Contact4D: A Video Dataset for Whole-Body Human Motion and Finger Contact in Dexterous Operations

1Carnegie Mellon University 2AIST 3KAIST
3DV 2026

Abstract

Understanding how humans interact with objects is key to building robust human-centric artificial intelligence. However, this area remains relatively unexplored due to the lack of large-scale datasets. Recent datasets focusing on this issue mainly consist of activities captured entirely in controlled lab environments, and contact annotations are mostly estimated using threshold clips. We introduce Contact4D, a multi-view video dataset for human-object interaction that provides detailed body poses and accurate contact annotations. We use a flexible multi-view capture system to record individuals performing furniture assembly tasks and provide annotations for human detection, tracking, 2D/3D pose estimation, and ground-truth contact. Additionally, we propose a novel processing pipeline to extract accurate hand poses even when they are severely occluded. Contact4D consists of 2M images captured from 19 synchronized cameras across 350 video sequences, spanning diverse environments, varioius furniture types, and unique subjects. We evaluate existing methods for human pose estimation and human-centric contact estimation, demonstrating their inability to generalize to our dataset. Lastly, we fine-tune a pretrained MultiHMR model on Contact4D and observe an improved performance of 56.6% body MPJPE and 26.4% hand MPJPE in scenarios under severe self-occlusion and object occlusion.

Dataset Statistics

34
capture sessions
448
recorded sequences
8
scenes
6
furniture types
18
exo cameras
2.68M
total images

Capture Scenes

Furniture-assembly capture scenes

Subjects assembling furniture across distinct rooms and object types.

Annotation Types

Camera

Per-frame intrinsics and extrinsics for all 18 exo cameras + the Aria egocentric device.

Keypoints

2D and 3D body + hand keypoints, in world and camera space.

Mesh

Fitted SMPL, SMPL-X, and MANO parameters for every annotated frame.

Multi-camera capture rig schematic

17 synchronized exo cameras ring each subject, plus one head-worn Aria egocentric device.

Dataset Examples

30-session diversity gallery

Raw images from Contact4D — spanning distinct subjects, rooms, and furniture-assembly tasks.

Annotation types strip

Raw image, 2D body+hand keypoints, SMPL, SMPL-X, MANO, and per-fingertip contact state.

Pose + Mesh Examples

Finger Contact Examples

session_01, exo cam03.

session_07, exo cam01.

session_09, exo cam09.

session_13, exo cam09.

session_14, exo cam05.

session_18, exo cam09.

Per-fingertip contact state shown as a fixed HUD panel per hand: red = in contact, green = not.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{song2026contact4d,
  title={Contact4d: A video dataset for whole-body human motion and finger contact in dexterous operations},
  author={Song, Jyun-Ting and Kim, JungEun and Cao, Jinkun and Lei, Yu and Yagi, Takuma and Kitani, Kris},
  booktitle={2026 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)},
  pages={904--914},
  year={2026},
  organization={IEEE}
}