3D hand pose estimation based on RGB images has been studied for a long time. Most of the studies, however, have performed frame-by-frame estimation based on independent static images. In this paper, we attempt to not only consider the appearance of a hand but incorporate the temporal movement information of a hand in motion into the learning framework for better 3D hand pose estimation performance, which leads to the necessity of a large scale dataset with sequential RGB hand images. We propose a novel method that generates a synthetic dataset that mimics natural human hand movements by re-engineering annotations of an extant static hand pose dataset into pose-flows. With the generated dataset, we train a newly proposed recurrent framework, exploiting visuo-temporal features from sequential images of synthetic hands in motion and emphasizing temporal smoothness of estimations with a temporal consistency constraint. Our novel training strategy of detaching the recurrent layer of the framework during domain finetuning from synthetic to real allows preservation of the visuo-temporal features learned from sequential synthetic hand images. Hand poses that are sequentially estimated consequently produce natural and smooth hand movements which lead to more robust estimations. We show that utilizing temporal information for 3D hand pose estimation significantly enhances general pose estimations by outperforming state-of-the-art methods in experiments on hand pose estimation benchmarks.
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