Existing hand detection algorithms work on images and the detection rate is restricted by the frame rate of the camera. In hand detection applications for moving robotic systems, conventional cameras cause motion blur, especially in darker lighting conditions. We can leverage the use of event-based cameras which possess a high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low power consumption. Recent work has shown that using a stereo setup of an event-based and a frame-based camera improves detection accuracy and the bandwidth-latency tradeoff. The main bottleneck in using event-based cameras in object detection and recognition tasks is a relatively low amount of training data. In this work, we propose a methodology and an exemplary synthetic event-based hand dataset from an egocentric, first-person view perspective. The data is synthesized from the existing RGB Egohands dataset with the v2e toolbox. Parameters of the v2e toolbox are varied to provide versions of the dataset with different lighting conditions and scales. Ground truth detections are generated with a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model which is applied to the RGB images in the Egohands dataset and interpolated on the high-temporal resolution events. We use the multi-modal dataset to perform hand detection with existing object detection algorithms which use a multi-modal setup of event and RGB cameras and demonstrate performance comparable to the state-of-the-art.
Generated (or synthetic) image data is increasingly used to augment or replace real training datasets when target imagery is scarce, expensive, or biased. For hand detection, particularly in occupational safety settings, public datasets mostly contain bare hands. This under-represents the variation in hand appearance introduced by gloves, tattoos, jewelry, and other personal protective equipment, creating a distribution shift that safety-critical applications encounter at deployment. We test whether generative inpainting, editing only the hand region of a real photograph to introduce accessories, can close this shift gap. On a paired dataset of real images and their synthetic counterparts, we train YOLOv8n hand detectors under six training-and-scheduling regimes (Experiments A-F, three random seeds each), evaluate every detector on a real test set and on a real-gloves-only test split, and report the mean average precision (mAP) at two overlap thresholds (mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95) along with paired statistical tests. A two-stage experiment: train on real U synthetic data, then fine-tune the resulting weights on real-only at a lower learning rate, increases mAP@0.5 compared to the real-only baseline model on the standard real test set, and improves the real-gloves out-of-distribution gap. Another three-stage experiment preserves box-tightness best, reaching the highest mAP@0.5:0.95 of any other experiment in the study. The synthetic-data utility for safety-critical hand detection is determined by the training procedure, and simple multi-stage experiments extract substantial real-deployment benefit from inpainted accessory data.