PointVGGT: Zero-Shot Multiview RGB-D Point Cloud Registration with Visual Geometry Foundation Priors

Abstract

This paper addresses multiview RGB-D point cloud registration, aiming to estimate global rigid poses for unordered RGB-D scans and align them in a metrically consistent coordinate frame. The conventional pairwise-then-global paradigm suffers from locally optimized pairwise registration, severe error propagation and high computational burden. In particular, existing methods typically treat RGB data as a mere auxiliary matching cue and overlook the holistic geometric priors (e.g., camera poses and 3D models) encoded across image sequences. This paper introduces PointVGGT, a zero-shot framework built upon a novel \emph{foundation-then-refinement} paradigm that systematically leverages visual geometry foundation models (e.g., VGGT) as the computational backbone for robust, training-free multiview RGB-D registration. In the foundation stage, we directly recover metrically consistent global poses (without any pairwise estimation) by grounding the scale-ambiguous pose predictions of the foundation model against metric depth observations. In the refinement stage, we introduce an efficient voxelized spatial hashing mechanism that exploits the globally coherent 3D reconstruction (induced by the foundation model) as a shared spatial anchor, enabling dense multiview correspondences in near-linear time. On top of this, an IRLS-based robust motion-only bundle adjustment is performed using a conjugate gradient solver to jointly minimize the correspondence and reprojection residuals for multiview pose refinement. Extensive experiments on indoor/object-centric/outdoor datasets verify the outstanding zero-shot registration accuracy and computational efficiency of our proposed method.