English

VGGT-Motion: Motion-Aware Calibration-Free Monocular SLAM for Long-Range Consistency

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-06 v1

Abstract

Despite recent progress in calibration-free monocular SLAM via 3D vision foundation models, scale drift remains severe on long sequences. Motion-agnostic partitioning breaks contextual coherence and causes zero-motion drift, while conventional geometric alignment is computationally expensive. To address these issues, we propose VGGT-Motion, a calibration-free SLAM system for efficient and robust global consistency over kilometer-scale trajectories. Specifically, we first propose a motion-aware submap construction mechanism that uses optical flow to guide adaptive partitioning, prune static redundancy, and encapsulate turns for stable local geometry. We then design an anchor-driven direct Sim(3) registration strategy. By exploiting context-balanced anchors, it achieves search-free, pixel-wise dense alignment and efficient loop closure without costly feature matching. Finally, a lightweight submap-level pose graph optimization enforces global consistency with linear complexity, enabling scalable long-range operation. Experiments show that VGGT-Motion markedly improves trajectory accuracy and efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot, long-range calibration-free monocular SLAM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.05508,
  title  = {VGGT-Motion: Motion-Aware Calibration-Free Monocular SLAM for Long-Range Consistency},
  author = {Zhuang Xiong and Chen Zhang and Qingshan Xu and Wenbing Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05508},
  year   = {2026}
}