The Sterkfontein Caves Dataset: A Novel View Synthesis Challenge from the Cradle of Humankind

Abstract

We introduce the challenging Sterkfontein Caves dataset comprising ten underground scenes from a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and use it to find a new simple baseline method that beats existing low-light reconstruction methods upon it. Each scene is of complex surface geometry and high-frequency texture from cave rock structures, including human-made markings on the rock face. The captured images exhibit varied or uncontrolled lighting over a large dynamic range, with glare artefacts, and low signal-to-noise ratios from the challenging dark real-world capture scenario. We propose a view synthesis benchmark for low-light RAW and sRGB reconstruction. All tested NeRF and Gaussian splatting baseline methods struggle on this data, with the best performing method in terms of reliability and average PSNR being our Raw-Nerfacto method. We discuss these errors in detail to find directions of future work for the community in overcoming the significant challenges that remain in low-light high-detail scenes.

Ireton Liu

Steven James

Lab Director

My research interests include reinforcement learning and planning.

Richard Klein

PRIME Lab Director

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and a co-PI of the PRIME lab.