TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object Correspondence to Hand for Motion Refinement

We present TOCH, a method for refining incorrect 3D hand-object interaction sequences using a data prior. Existing hand trackers, especially those that rely on very few cameras, often produce visually unrealistic results with hand-object intersection or missing contacts. Although correcting such errors requires reasoning about temporal aspects of interaction, most previous work focus on static grasps and contacts. The core of our method are TOCH fields, a novel spatio-temporal representation for modeling correspondences between hands and objects during interaction. The key component is a point-wise object-centric representation which encodes the hand position relative to the object. Leveraging this novel representation, we learn a latent manifold of plausible TOCH fields with a temporal denoising auto-encoder. Experiments demonstrate that TOCH outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D hand-object interaction models, which are limited to static grasps and contacts. More importantly, our method produces smooth interactions even before and after contact. Using a single trained TOCH model, we quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate its usefulness for 1) correcting erroneous reconstruction results from off-the-shelf RGB/RGB-D hand-object reconstruction methods, 2) de-noising, and 3) grasp transfer across objects. We will release our code and trained model on our project page at http://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/toch/