Empowering Feed-Forward Reconstruction Models with Metric Scale via Satellite Images

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models have recently shown strong generalization across diverse scenes, yet most of them recover geometry only up to an unknown global scale. This scale ambiguity limits their use in applications that require metric understanding of the environment. Existing metric reconstruction methods commonly rely on large-scale metric annotations or accurate camera calibration, both of which are costly or unreliable in many real-world settings. We propose a satellite-guided framework for resolving scale ambiguity in outdoor feed-forward 3D reconstruction. The key idea is to use readily available satellite imagery as a global metric reference. Given coarse position and heading estimates, our method retrieves a local satellite patch and integrates it with a feed-forward reconstruction backbone through bidirectional cross-view interaction. By enforcing consistency between the reconstructed scene and the satellite reference, the model infers absolute scale, refines scene geometry, and estimates camera pose in a metric coordinate frame. Experiments on KITTI, nuScenes, and Oxford RobotCar demonstrate improvements in metric depth estimation, multi-view point-cloud reconstruction, and camera localization under the evaluated cross-dataset and geographic transfer protocols.