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Main Authors: Cotton, R. James, Firouzabadi, Pouyan, Murray, Wendy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09258
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author Cotton, R. James
Firouzabadi, Pouyan
Murray, Wendy
author_facet Cotton, R. James
Firouzabadi, Pouyan
Murray, Wendy
contents Accurate hand and finger tracking from video has significant clinical applications for monitoring activities of daily living and measuring range of motion, yet monocular video approaches for obtaining hand biomechanics remain under-developed. We present a method that combines the SAM 3D Body foundation model with inverse kinematics optimization in a full-body biomechanical model to extract anatomically-constrained finger joint angles from single-view video. We port SAM 3D Body from PyTorch to JAX for integration with MuJoCo-MJX, enabling GPU-accelerated optimization, and develop a novel mapping between the Momentum Human Rig (MHR) outputs and biomechanical model markers. Validation against 8-camera multiview reconstruction on 4,590 frames from 7 participants performing a variety of hand poses and object manipulation tasks shows finger joint angle errors of approximately 10 degrees and hand position errors of approximately 6 mm, after Procrustes alignment. Results were consistent across camera viewpoints and robust to different methods for producing reference values from multiview video. This work extends monocular biomechanical analysis to detailed finger tracking, expanding access to quantitative characterization of hand movement from readily available video.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09258
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Monocular Biomechanical Tracking of Fingers with Inverse Kinematics to Foundation Models
Cotton, R. James
Firouzabadi, Pouyan
Murray, Wendy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate hand and finger tracking from video has significant clinical applications for monitoring activities of daily living and measuring range of motion, yet monocular video approaches for obtaining hand biomechanics remain under-developed. We present a method that combines the SAM 3D Body foundation model with inverse kinematics optimization in a full-body biomechanical model to extract anatomically-constrained finger joint angles from single-view video. We port SAM 3D Body from PyTorch to JAX for integration with MuJoCo-MJX, enabling GPU-accelerated optimization, and develop a novel mapping between the Momentum Human Rig (MHR) outputs and biomechanical model markers. Validation against 8-camera multiview reconstruction on 4,590 frames from 7 participants performing a variety of hand poses and object manipulation tasks shows finger joint angle errors of approximately 10 degrees and hand position errors of approximately 6 mm, after Procrustes alignment. Results were consistent across camera viewpoints and robust to different methods for producing reference values from multiview video. This work extends monocular biomechanical analysis to detailed finger tracking, expanding access to quantitative characterization of hand movement from readily available video.
title Monocular Biomechanical Tracking of Fingers with Inverse Kinematics to Foundation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09258