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

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 humanmade 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.Weproposeaviewsynthesisbenchmarkforlow-lightRAWandsRGB reconstruction. All tested NeRF and Gaussian splatting baseline methods struggleonthisdata,withthebestperformingmethodintermsofreliability andaveragePSNRbeingourRaw-Nerfactomethod.Wediscusstheseerrors in detail to find directions of future work for the community in overcoming the significant challenges that remain in low-light high-detail scenes. Our dataset is publicly available at https://visual.cs.brown.edu/sterkfontein.