# LiDAR-VGGT: Cross-Modal Coarse-to-Fine Fusion for Globally Consistent and Metric-Scale Dense Mapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01186/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06829/) (2021)
- [MV-DUSt3R+: Single-Stage Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Views In 2 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06974/) (2024)
- [VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12549/) (2025)
- [VGGT-Long: Chunk it, Loop it, Align it -- Pushing VGGT's Limits on Kilometer-scale Long RGB Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16443/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Image and Point Cloud Fusion in Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05224/) (2020)
- [SLAM3R: Real-Time Dense Scene Reconstruction from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09401/) (2024)
- [FAST-LIO: A Fast, Robust LiDAR-inertial Odometry Package by Tightly-Coupled Iterated Kalman Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08196/) (2020)
- [OverlapNet: Loop Closing for LiDAR-based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11344/) (2021)
- [3D Point Cloud Processing and Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00601/) (2020)
- [Kimera-Multi: Robust, Distributed, Dense Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14386/) (2021)
- [R3LIVE: A Robust, Real-time, RGB-colored, LiDAR-Inertial-Visual tightly-coupled state Estimation and mapping package](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07982/) (2021)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-NeRF: Novel LiDAR View Synthesis via Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10406/) (2023)
- [FAST-LIVO2: Fast, Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14035/) (2024)
- [RING++: Roto-translation Invariant Gram for Global Localization on a Sparse Scan Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05984/) (2022)
- [FAST-LIVO: Fast and Tightly-coupled Sparse-Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00893/) (2022)
- [Gaussian-LIC: Real-Time Photo-Realistic SLAM with Gaussian Splatting and LiDAR-Inertial-Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06926/) (2024)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Loop Closing and Relocalization for Reliable LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08086/) (2023)
- [SiLVR: Scalable Lidar-Visual Reconstruction with Neural Radiance Fields for Robotic Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06877/) (2024)
- [GS-LIVO: Real-Time LiDAR, Inertial, and Visual Multi-sensor Fused Odometry with Gaussian Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08672/) (2025)
- [MUN-FRL: A Visual Inertial LiDAR Dataset for Aerial Autonomous Navigation and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08435/) (2023)
- [LEMON-Mapping: Loop-Enhanced Large-Scale Multi-Session Point Cloud Merging and Optimization for Globally Consistent Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10018/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [VGGT-Omega](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15195/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Color-Stratified Point Cloud Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06839/) (2026)
- [Efficient Feature-Free Initialization for Monocular Visual-Inertial Systems Using a Feed-Forward 3D Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17327/) (2026)
- [Adapting Vision Foundation Models to Acoustics for Pose-Free 3D Sonar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06261/) (2026)
- [MIRAGE: Metric Inference and Reliability-Aware Gaussian Estimation from Feed-Forward Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12568/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing large-scale colored point clouds is an important task in robotics, supporting perception, navigation, and scene understanding. Despite advances in LiDAR inertial visual odometry (LIVO), its performance remains highly sensitive to extrinsic calibration. Meanwhile, 3D vision foundation models, such as VGGT, suffer from limited scalability in large environments and inherently lack metric scale. To overcome these limitations, we propose LiDAR-VGGT, a novel framework that tightly couples LiDAR inertial odometry with the state-of-the-art VGGT model through a two-stage coarse- to-fine fusion pipeline: First, a pre-fusion module with robust initialization refinement efficiently estimates VGGT poses and point clouds with coarse metric scale within each session. Then, a post-fusion module enhances cross-modal 3D similarity transformation, using bounding-box-based regularization to reduce scale distortions caused by inconsistent FOVs between LiDAR and camera sensors. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that LiDAR-VGGT achieves dense, globally consistent colored point clouds and outperforms both VGGT-based methods and LIVO baselines. The implementation of our proposed novel color point cloud evaluation toolkit will be released as open source.