  Model-based approaches to 3D hand tracking have been shown to perform well in
a wide range of scenarios. However, they require initialisation and cannot
recover easily from tracking failures that occur due to fast hand motions.
Data-driven approaches, on the other hand, can quickly deliver a solution, but
the results often suffer from lower accuracy or missing anatomical validity
compared to those obtained from model-based approaches. In this work we propose
a hybrid approach for hand pose estimation from a single depth image. First, a
learned regressor is employed to deliver multiple initial hypotheses for the 3D
position of each hand joint. Subsequently, the kinematic parameters of a 3D
hand model are found by deliberately exploiting the inherent uncertainty of the
inferred joint proposals. This way, the method provides anatomically valid and
accurate solutions without requiring manual initialisation or suffering from
track losses. Quantitative results on several standard datasets demonstrate
that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art representatives of the
model-based, data-driven and hybrid paradigms.
