CrossInfoNet: Multi-Task Information Sharing Based Hand Pose Estimation

This paper focuses on the topic of vision based hand pose estimation from single depth map using convolutional neural network (CNN). Our main contributions lie in designing a new pose regression network architecture named CrossInfoNet. The proposed CrossInfoNet decomposes hand pose estimation task into palm pose estimation sub-task and finger pose estimation sub-task, and adopts two-branch cross-connection structure to share the beneficial complementary information between the sub-tasks. Our work is inspired by multi-task information sharing mechanism, which has been few discussed in hand pose estimation using depth data in previous publications. In addition, we propose a heat-map guided feature extraction structure to get better feature maps, and train the complete network end-to-end. The effectiveness of the proposed CrossInfoNet is evaluated with extensively self-comparative experiments and in comparison with state-of-the-art methods on four public hand pose datasets. The code is available.