Enhancing Hands in 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation with Conditional Hands Modulator

Accurately recovering hand poses within the body context remains a major challenge in 3D whole-body pose estimation. This difficulty arises from a fundamental supervision gap: whole-body pose estimators are trained on full-body datasets with limited hand diversity, while hand-only estimators, trained on hand-centric datasets, excel at detailed finger articulation but lack global body awareness. To address this, we propose WholeBody++, a modular framework that leverages the strengths of both pre-trained whole-body and hand pose estimators. We introduce CHAM (Conditional Hands Modulator), a lightweight module that modulates the whole-body feature stream using hand-specific features extracted from a pre-trained hand pose estimator. This modulation enables the whole-body model to predict wrist orientations that are both accurate and coherent with the upper-body kinematic structure, without retraining the full-body model. In parallel, we directly incorporate finger articulations and hand shapes predicted by the hand pose estimator, aligning them to the full-body mesh via differentiable rigid alignment. This design allows WholeBody++ to combine globally consistent body reasoning with fine-grained hand detail. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WholeBody++ substantially improves hand accuracy and enhances overall full-body pose quality. Code and pretrained models will be released publicly.