Learning Correlation-aware Aleatoric Uncertainty for 3D Hand Pose Estimation


Lee Chae-Yeon (Pohang University of Science and Technology), Nam Hyeon-Woo (Pohang University of Science and Technology), Tae-Hyun Oh (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
The 35th British Machine Vision Conference
PDFPosterVideo (Right click to download)Supplementary

Abstract

3D hand pose estimation is a fundamental task in understanding human hands. However, accurately estimating 3D hand poses remains challenging due to the complex movement of hands, self-similarity, and frequent occlusions. In this work, we address two limitations: the inability of existing 3D hand pose estimation methods to estimate aleatoric (data) uncertainty, and the lack of uncertainty modeling that incorporates joint correlation knowledge, which has not been thoroughly investigated. To this end, we introduce aleatoric uncertainty modeling into the 3D hand pose estimation framework, aiming to achieve a better trade-off between modeling joint correlations and computational efficiency. We propose a novel parameterization that leverages a single linear layer to capture intrinsic correlations among hand joints. This is enabled by formulating the hand joint output space as a probabilistic distribution, allowing the linear layer to capture joint correlations. Our proposed parameterization is used as a task head layer, and can be applied as an add-on module on top of the existing models. Our experiments demonstrate that our parameterization for uncertainty modeling outperforms existing approaches. Furthermore, the 3D hand pose estimation model equipped with our uncertainty head achieves favorable accuracy in 3D hand pose estimation while introducing new uncertainty modeling capability to the model. The project page is available at https://hand-uncertainty.github.io/.

Citation

@inproceedings{Chae-Yeon_2025_BMVC,
author    = {Lee Chae-Yeon and Nam Hyeon-Woo and Tae-Hyun Oh},
title     = {Learning Correlation-aware Aleatoric Uncertainty for 3D Hand Pose Estimation},
booktitle = {36th British Machine Vision Conference 2025, {BMVC} 2025, Sheffield, UK, November 24-27, 2025},
publisher = {BMVA},
year      = {2025},
url       = {https://bmva-archive.org.uk/bmvc/2025/assets/papers/Paper_1060/paper.pdf}
}


Copyright © 2025 The British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition
The British Machine Vision Conference is organised by The British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition. The Association is a Company limited by guarantee, No.2543446, and a non-profit-making body, registered in England and Wales as Charity No.1002307 (Registered Office: Dept. of Computer Science, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK).

Imprint | Data Protection