MaskHOI: Robust 3D Hand-Object Interaction Estimation via Masked Pre-training

Abstract: In 3D hand-object interaction (HOI) tasks, estimating precise joint poses of hands and objects from monocular RGB input remains highly challenging due to the inherent geometric ambiguity of RGB images and the severe mutual occlusions that occur during interaction.To address these challenges, we propose MaskHOI, a novel Masked Autoencoder (MAE)-driven pretraining framework for enhanced HOI pose estimation. Our core idea is to leverage the masking-then-reconstruction strategy of MAE to encourage the feature encoder to infer missing spatial and structural information, thereby facilitating geometric-aware and occlusion-robust representation learning. Specifically, based on our observation that human hands exhibit far greater geometric complexity than rigid objects, conventional uniform masking fails to effectively guide the reconstruction of fine-grained hand structures. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Region-specific Mask Ratio Allocation, primarily comprising the region-specific masking assignment and the skeleton-driven hand masking guidance. The former adaptively assigns lower masking ratios to hand regions than to rigid objects, balancing their feature learning difficulty, while the latter prioritizes masking critical hand parts (e.g., fingertips or entire fingers) to realistically simulate occlusion patterns in real-world interactions. Furthermore, to enhance the geometric awareness of the pretrained encoder, we introduce a novel Masked Signed Distance Field (SDF)-driven multimodal learning mechanism. Through the self-masking 3D SDF prediction, the learned encoder is able to perceive the global geometric structure of hands and objects beyond the 2D image plane, overcoming the inherent limitations of monocular input and alleviating self-occlusion issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.