Collaborative filtering aims to predict unknown user ratings in a recommender system by collectively assessing known user preferences. In this paper, we first draw analogies between collaborative filtering and the pose estimation problem. Specifically, we recast the hand pose estimation problem as the cold-start problem for a new user with unknown item ratings in a recommender system. Inspired by fast and accurate matrix factorization techniques for collaborative filtering, we develop a real-time algorithm for estimating the hand pose from RGB-D data of a commercial depth camera. First, we efficiently identify nearest neighbors using local shape descriptors in the RGB-D domain from a library of hand poses with known pose parameter values. We then use this information to evaluate the unknown pose parameters using a joint matrix factorization and completion (JMFC) approach. Our quantitative and qualitative results suggest that our approach is robust to variation in hand configurations while achieving real time performance (29 FPS) on a standard computer.
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