Visual challenges in underwater environments significantly hinder the accuracy of vision-based localisation and the high-fidelity dense reconstruction. In this paper, we propose VISO, a robust underwater SLAM system that fuses a stereo camera, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a 3D sonar to achieve accurate 6-DoF localisation and enable efficient dense 3D reconstruction with high photometric fidelity. We introduce a coarse-to-fine online calibration approach for extrinsic parameters estimation between the 3D sonar and the camera. Additionally, a photometric rendering strategy is proposed for the 3D sonar point cloud to enrich the sonar map with visual information. Extensive experiments in a laboratory tank and an open lake demonstrate that VISO surpasses current state-of-the-art underwater and visual-based SLAM algorithms in terms of localisation robustness and accuracy, while also exhibiting real-time dense 3D reconstruction performance comparable to the offline dense mapping method.
@article{arxiv.2601.01144,
title = {VISO: Robust Underwater Visual-Inertial-Sonar SLAM with Photometric Rendering for Dense 3D Reconstruction},
author = {Shu Pan and Simon Archieri and Ahmet Cinar and Jonatan Scharff Willners and Ignacio Carlucho and Yvan Petillot},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.01144},
year = {2026}
}