Sphere-meshes for real-time hand modeling and tracking

Modern systems for real-time hand tracking rely on a combination of discriminative and generative approaches to robustly recover hand poses. Generative approaches require the specification of a geometric model. In this paper, we propose a the use of sphere-meshes as a novel geometric representation for real-time generative hand tracking. How tightly this model fits a specific user heavily affects tracking precision. We derive an optimization to non-rigidly deform a template model to fit the user data in a number of poses. This optimization jointly captures the user's static and dynamic hand geometry, thus facilitating high-precision registration. At the same time, the limited number of primitives in the tracking template allows us to retain excellent computational performance. We confirm this by embedding our models in an open source real-time registration algorithm to obtain a tracker steadily running at 60Hz. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by qualitatively and quantitatively evaluating tracking precision on a variety of complex motions. We show that the improved tracking accuracy at high frame-rate enables stable tracking of extended and complex motion sequences without the need for per-frame re-initialization. To enable further research in the area of high-precision hand tracking, we publicly release source code and evaluation datasets.