Hand-Transformer: Non-Autoregressive Structured Modeling for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

3D hand pose estimation is still far from a well-solved problem mainly due to the highly nonlinear dynamics of hand pose and the difficulties of modeling its inherent structural dependencies. To address this issue, we connect this structured output learning problem with the structured modeling framework in sequence transduction field. Standard transduction models like Transformer adopt an autoregressive connection to capture dependencies from previously generated tokens and further correlate this information with the input sequence in order to prioritize the set of relevant input tokens for current token generation. To borrow wisdom from this structured learning framework while avoiding the sequential modeling for hand pose, taking a 3D point set as input, we propose to leverage the Transformer architecture with a novel non-autoregressive structured decoding mechanism. Specifically, instead of using previously generated results, our decoder utilizes a reference hand pose to provide equivalent dependencies among hand joints for each output joint generation. By imposing the reference structural dependencies, we can correlate the information with the input 3D points through a multi-head attention mechanism, aiming to discover informative points from different perspectives, towards each hand joint localization. We demonstrate our model’s effectiveness over multiple challenging hand pose datasets, comparing with several state-of-the-art methods.