DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision
Lu LingYichen ShengZhi TuWentian ZhaoCheng XinKun WanLantao YuQianyu GuoZixun YuYawen Lu
Introduces a large-scale real-world dataset of over ten thousand 4K videos across diverse scene types to benchmark novel view synthesis methods and train generalizable neural radiance fields.
Deep learning techniques for 3D computer vision and novel view synthesis—the ability to generate new visual perspectives of a scene from captured images—are crucial for emerging applications in virtual reality, augmented reality, and spatial simulation. However, progress in this domain has been significantly constrained by existing scene-level datasets, which rely heavily on synthetic environments or small, domain-specific collections of real-world captures. These existing resources fail to capture complex real-world visual phenomena, such as complex lighting, transparency, reflections, and unbounded outdoor spaces, preventing rigorous benchmarking and limiting the ability of models to learn universal 3D visual representations.
The article addresses this bottleneck by introducing DL3DV-10K, a massive multi-view scene dataset, and evaluating state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and rendering algorithms across diverse, real-world conditions. Specifically, the article aims to benchmark leading novel view synthesis techniques on a standardized set of challenging real-world scenes and demonstrate that large-scale pretraining on diverse real scenes enhances the generalizability of 3D representation models.
To construct this resource, the researchers collected 10,510 high-resolution (4K) videos containing over 51.2 million frames across 65 categories of everyday locations, ranging from restaurants and retail spaces to outdoor parks. The team employed standard consumer smartphones and drones, applying standardized capture paths and rigorous quality screening to protect personal privacy and minimize blur. Each scene was systematically annotated based on environmental settings (indoor versus outdoor), lighting conditions, surface reflectivity, material transparency, and texture frequency. From this collection, the authors established a balanced benchmark of 140 representative scenes, DL3DV-140, to rigorously test five leading view-synthesis methods under standardized experimental constraints, alongside pretraining experiments for generalizable neural rendering architectures.
The benchmark evaluation yielded four critical findings. First, Zip-NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) consistently outperformed older neural rendering baselines in image reconstruction quality across all standardized visual metrics. Second, 3DGS achieved rendering quality comparable to the top neural methods while requiring a fraction of the computational training time (2.1 hours versus 48 hours for Mip-NeRF 360), though Zip-NeRF achieved slightly higher absolute visual fidelity at the cost of higher memory demands. Third, across all evaluated methods, unbounded outdoor environments and scenes with high transparency proved to be the most challenging conditions, resulting in the lowest overall quality scores. Finally, pilot experiments showed that pretraining generalizable neural models on DL3DV-10K consistently improved their downstream performance on unseen target benchmarks, whereas pretraining on narrower indoor-only datasets failed to produce similar improvements.
These findings indicate that 3D vision systems can successfully transition toward foundational models capable of general scene understanding when trained on diverse real-world multi-view data. For decision-makers and technical leaders, the results highlight distinct trade-offs between rendering speed, compute cost, and visual accuracy. Teams prioritizing rapid training and real-time rendering can deploy 3DGS, while those prioritizing maximum detail on complex surfaces may prefer advanced grid-based neural radiance fields, provided they account for greater hardware memory requirements. Moreover, the failure of indoor-only datasets to generalize proves that training data diversity is non-negotiable for robust real-world performance.
Organizations developing 3D spatial platforms should leverage large-scale, diverse real-world datasets for pretraining rather than relying exclusively on synthetic or single-domain indoor captures. Future research and development should focus specifically on improving rendering accuracy in unbounded outdoor scenes and complex transparent environments, where current methods still struggle. Additionally, teams should explore dynamic novel view synthesis models that can natively handle transient elements, such as moving objects or pedestrians.
The findings are supported by comprehensive statistical evaluations across 140 diverse scenes and standard vision metrics. However, decision-makers should note that DL3DV-10K primarily targets static scenes, even though a minority of captures contain brief appearances of moving objects (between 3 and 10 seconds) inherent to real-world data collection. Overall, the evidence provides high confidence that large-scale, fine-grained real scene datasets are essential for building robust, generalizable 3D visual representations.
- Paper: NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis, Ben Mildenhall et al. (2020). This seminal paper introduces Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), establishing the foundational 3D novel view synthesis methodology that DL3DV-10K directly benchmarks and seeks to scale.
- Paper: Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields, Jonathan T. Barron et al. (2022). It presents techniques for anti-aliased view synthesis in unbounded real-world 360-degree scenes, representing a key benchmark target evaluated on DL3DV-10K.
- Paper: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering, Bernhard Kerbl et al. (2023). This work introduces 3D Gaussian Splatting for real-time radiance field rendering, providing a primary modern novel view synthesis baseline benchmarked across the dataset.
- Paper: pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images, Alex Yu et al. (2021). It pioneers generalizable neural radiance fields that condition directly on image features across multiple scenes, motivating DL3DV-10K's pilot studies on generalizable representation learning.
- Paper: Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields, Dor Verbin et al. (2022). It addresses view-dependent reflection modeling in neural radiance fields, providing necessary background for handling the complex specular and reflective scenes included in DL3DV-10K.
- Paper: TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields, Anpei Chen et al. (2022). It introduces tensorial radiance field decomposition for efficient scene reconstruction, representing an important baseline in modern novel view synthesis benchmarking.
- Paper: NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections, Ricardo Martin-Brualla et al. (2021). It develops methods for handling variable illumination and unconstrained captures in radiance fields, establishing foundational concepts for real-world scene-level novel view synthesis.
- Paper: Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments, Angel Chang et al. (2017). It established an influential benchmark for RGB-D indoor scene understanding, highlighting the dataset scale and diversity gaps that DL3DV-10K expands upon for neural rendering.
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