VGGT-Geo: Probabilistic Geometric Fusion of Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer Priors for Robust Dense Indoor SLAM
With the rapid evolution of Digital Twins and Embodied AI, achieving fast, dense, and high-precision 3D perception in unknown environments has become paramount. However, existing Visual SLAM paradigms face a critical dilemma: geometry-based methods often fail in texture-less areas due to feature scarcity, while learning-based approaches frequently suffer from scale drift and unphysical deformations. To bridge this gap, we propose VGGT-Geo, a novel SLAM system that synergizes generative priors from Large Foundation Models with multi-modal geometric optimization. Distinguishing itself from simple cascaded architectures, we construct a Probabilistic Geometric Fusion framework, consisting of (1) Generative Warm-start, leveraging the holistic scene understanding capabilities of the VGGT, (2) Confidence-Aware Optimization to extract dense features via DINOv3 and predict their confidence map, and (3) a Multi-Modal Constraint Closure that fuses point-line features and metric depth priors to constrain rotational Degrees of Freedom in Manhattan Worlds. We conducted systematic evaluations on TUM, Replica, Tanks and Temples, and a challenging self-collected dataset featuring extreme lighting and texture-less walls. Experimental results demonstrate that VGGT-Geo exhibits superior robustness and accuracy in unseen environments. On our most challenging dataset, it achieves an Absolute Trajectory Error of 4–5 cm and a Relative Rotation Error of 0.79°, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods by approximately 50% in trajectory accuracy. This study validates that synergizing the intuition of Large Foundation Models with geometric rigor is a viable path toward next-generation robust SLAM.
Authors
- Yin Han Gao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0763-0254)
- Haitao Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4804-3806)
- Zhigang Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6782-9249)
- Shuai Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9928-5437)
- Banghui Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0872-8645)
- Kai Qin
- Zhenxin Zhang
- Dingjie Zhou
- Jing Li
- Yuchen Li
- Sisi Zlatanova
- Sizhe Shen
- Xiangjun Qu
Institutions
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- UNSW Sydney (AU)
- Aerospace Information Research Institute (CN)
- Nanjing Surveying and Mapping Research Institute (China) (CN)
- National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation of China (CN)
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Capital Normal University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
- Published
- 2026-02-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi15020085
- Primary Topic
- Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00