# UniMetric: Universal Metric Scale Recovery for Visual Geometry Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16945/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [MapAnything: Universal Feed-Forward Metric 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13414/) (2025)
- [DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05575/) (2022)
- [Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12375/) (2025)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10893/) (2025)
- [BEVHeight: A Robust Framework for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08498/) (2023)
- [Seed1.8 Model Card: Towards Generalized Real-World Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20633/) (2026)
- [LingBot-Map: Geometric Context Transformer for Streaming 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14141/) (2026)
- [Scal3R: Scalable Test-Time Training for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08542/) (2026)
- [BEVHeight++: Toward Robust Visual Centric 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16179/) (2023)
- [Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08807/) (2025)
- [MonoGAE: Roadside Monocular 3D Object Detection with Ground-Aware Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00400/) (2023)
- [V2X-Radar: A Multi-modal Dataset with 4D Radar for Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10962/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models, exemplified by GPT-6 Astra, raise the prospect of general-purpose embodied reasoning and planning. Using Internet videos for embodied pretraining calls for reliable physical-scale annotations. Yet visual geometry foundation models often recover scene structure and camera motion without reliable metric scale. We show that uncertain size priors of familiar objects can jointly constrain a reconstruction's shared scale. Building on this insight, we present UniMetric, a universal and training-free metric scale recovery framework for geometry foundation models, without additional sensors or task-specific metric supervision. Specifically, Metric Prior Acquisition elicits object height intervals from a vision-language model. Semantic-Geometric Alignment measures reconstructed object heights along the estimated support-surface normal in each frame and converts the priors into scale intervals. Global Scale Recovery reconciles these intervals through a convex objective, yielding a jointly feasible scale when they overlap and a unique compromise otherwise. The estimated sequence-level scale is applied uniformly to reconstructed points and camera translations. Controlled experiments with real VLM priors show that combining observations improves scale accuracy with exact relative object heights. To evaluate metric accuracy on GFM reconstructions without ground-truth scale alignment, we introduce MetricBench, covering twelve embodied, driving, and roadside subsets with sensor-derived ground truth. Across nine geometry foundation models, UniMetric reduces mean depth Abs Rel, reconstruction Chamfer distance, and trajectory error by 54.2%, 83.8%, and 65.6%, respectively, improving every model on all three tasks at the suite level. We release the UniMetric code and MetricBench data.