Intrinsic Hand Avatar: Illumination-aware Hand Appearance and Shape Reconstruction from Monocular RGB Video

Reconstructing a user-specific hand avatar is essential for a personalized experience in augmented and virtual reality systems. Current state-of-the-art avatar reconstruction methods use implicit representations to capture detailed geometry and appearance combined with neural rendering. However, these methods rely on a complicated multi-view setup, do not explicitly handle environment lighting leading to baked-in illumination and self-shadows, and require long hours for training. We present a method to reconstruct a hand avatar from a monocular RGB video of a user’s hand in arbitrary hand poses captured under real-world environment lighting. Specifically, our method jointly optimizes shape, appearance, and lighting parameters using a realistic shading model in a differentiable rendering framework incorporating Monte Carlo path tracing. Despite relying on physically-based rendering, our method can complete the reconstruction within minutes. In contrast to existing work, our method disentangles intrinsic properties of the underlying appearance and environment lighting, leading to realistic self-shadows. We compare our method with state-of-the-art hand avatar reconstruction methods and observe that it outperforms them on all commonly used metrics. We also evaluate our method on our captured dataset to emphasize its generalization capability. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our intrinsic hand avatar on novel pose synthesis and relighting. We plan to release our code to aid further research.