Self-Supervised Optimization of Hand Pose Estimation Using Anatomical Features and Iterative Learning

Manual assembly workers face increasing complexity in their work. Human-centered assistance systems could help, but object recognition as an enabling technology hinders a sophisticated human-centered design of these systems. At the same time, activity recognition based on hand poses suffers from poor pose estimation in complex usage scenarios, such as wearing gloves. This paper presents a self-supervised pipeline for adapting hand pose estimation to specific use cases with minimal human interaction. This enables cheap and robust hand pose-based activity recognition. The pipeline consists of a general machine learning model for hand pose estimation trained on a generalized dataset, spatial and temporal filtering to account for anatomical constraints of the hand, and a retraining step to improve the model. Different parameter combinations are evaluated on a publicly available and annotated dataset. The best parameter and model combination is then applied to unlabeled videos from a manual assembly scenario. The effectiveness of the pipeline is demonstrated by training an activity recognition as a downstream task in the manual assembly scenario.