Back To RGB: Deep articulated hand pose estimation from a single camera image

In this work, we demonstrate a method called Deep Hand Pose Machine(DHPM) that effectively detects the anatomical joints in the human hand based on single RGB images. Current state-of-the-art methods are able to robustly infer hand poses from RGB-D images. However, the depth map from an infrared camera does not operate well under direct sunlight. Performing hand tracking outdoors using depth sensors results in unreliable depth information and inaccurate poses. For this reason we were motivated to create this method which solely utilizes ordinary RGB image without additional depth information. Our approach adapts the pose machine algorithm, which has been used in the past to detect human body joints. We perform pose machine training on synthetic data to accurately predict the position of the joints in a real hand image.