Exploring thermal contact potentials for hand–object interaction refinement

Reconstructing hand–object interactions from visual data is difficult under severe occlusions, especially when soft objects are involved. In this work, we explore the use of thermal imagery as an additional cue for refining RGBbased hand–object reconstruction. We map multi-view thermal observations onto object surfaces and represent delayed thermal traces of contact as a contact potential field. This field is incorporated as a soft temporal cue to refine hand–object relative poses. Preliminary results indicate that thermal guidance can help resolve visually ambiguous configurations caused by occlusions.