EndoVGGT: GNN-Enhanced Depth Estimation for Surgical 3D Reconstruction

Accurate 3D reconstruction of deformable soft tissues is essential for surgical robotic perception. However, low-texture surfaces, specular highlights, and instrument occlusions often fragment geometric continuity, posing a challenge for existing fixed-topology approaches. To address this, we propose EndoVGGT, a geometry-centric framework equipped with a Deformation-aware Graph Attention (DeGAT) module. Rather than using static spatial neighborhoods, DeGAT dynamically constructs feature-space semantic graphs to capture long-range correlations among coherent tissue regions. This enables robust propagation of structural cues across occlusions, enforcing global consistency and improving non-rigid deformation recovery. Extensive experiments on SCARED show that our method significantly improves fidelity, increasing PSNR by 24.6% and SSIM by 9.1% over prior state-of-the-art. Crucially, EndoVGGT exhibits strong zero-shot cross-dataset generalization to the unseen SCARED and EndoNeRF domains, confirming that DeGAT learns domain-agnostic geometric priors. These results highlight the efficacy of dynamic feature-space modeling for consistent surgical 3D reconstruction.

Edge-Guided Occlusion Fading Reduction for a Light-Weighted Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods generally suffer the occlusion fading issue due to the lack of supervision by the per pixel ground truth. Although a post-processing method was proposed by Godard et. al. to reduce the occlusion fading, the compensated results have a severe halo effect. In this paper, we propose a novel Edge-Guided post-processing to reduce the occlusion fading issue for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. We further introduce Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) into the network to reduce the computational costs and improve the inference performance. The proposed ASPP-based network is lighter, faster, and better than current commonly used depth estimation networks. This light-weight network only needs 8.1 million parameters and can achieve up to 40 frames per second for $256\times512$ input in the inference stage using a single nVIDIA GTX1080 GPU. The proposed network also outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the KITTI benchmarks. The ASPP-based network and Edge-Guided post-processing produce better results either quantitatively and qualitatively than the competitors.