HOIST-Former: Hand-Held Objects Identification, Segmentation, and Tracking in the Wild

We address the challenging task of identifying, segmenting, and tracking hand-held objects, which is crucial for applications such as human action segmentation and per-formance evaluation. This task is particularly challenging due to heavy occlusion, rapid motion, and the transitory nature of objects being hand-held, where an object may be held, released, and subsequently picked up again. To tackle these challenges, we have developed a novel transformer-based architecture called HOIST-Former. HOIST-Former is adept at spatially and temporally segmenting hands and objects by iteratively pooling features from each other, ensuring that the processes of identification, segmentation, and tracking of hand-held objects depend on the hands' positions and their contextual appearance. We further refine HOIST-Former with a contact loss that focuses on areas where hands are in contact with objects. Moreover, we also contribute an in-the-wild video dataset called HOIST, which comprises 4,125 videos complete with bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and tracking IDs for hand-held objects. Through experiments on the HOIST dataset and two ad-ditional public datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of HOIST-Former in segmenting and tracking hand-held objects. Project page: https://supreethn.github.io/research/hoistformer/index.html