UAVLight: A Benchmark for Illumination-Robust 3D Reconstruction in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Scenes

TL;DR

UAVLight is a new benchmark dataset designed to evaluate and improve 3D reconstruction methods' robustness to lighting variations in UAV outdoor scenes, addressing a key challenge in real-world applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces UAVLight, a controlled yet realistic dataset with repeatable flight paths and lighting variations, enabling standardized evaluation of illumination-robust 3D reconstruction methods.

Findings

Provides a reliable benchmark for lighting robustness in UAV scenes

Enables development of methods that are consistent and relightable

Addresses a gap in existing datasets with limited illumination diversity

Abstract

Illumination inconsistency is a fundamental challenge in multi-view 3D reconstruction. Variations in sunlight direction, cloud cover, and shadows break the constant-lighting assumption underlying both classical multi-view stereo (MVS) and structure from motion (SfM) pipelines and recent neural rendering methods, leading to geometry drift, color inconsistency, and shadow imprinting. This issue is especially critical in UAV-based reconstruction, where long flight durations and outdoor environments make lighting changes unavoidable. However, existing datasets either restrict capture to short time windows, thus lacking meaningful illumination diversity, or span months and seasons, where geometric and semantic changes confound the isolated study of lighting robustness. We introduce UAVLight, a controlled-yet-real benchmark for illumination-robust 3D reconstruction. Each scene is captured along repeatable, geo-referenced flight paths at multiple fixed times of day, producing natural lighting variation under consistent geometry, calibration, and viewpoints. With standardized evaluation protocols across lighting conditions, UAVLight provides a reliable foundation for developing and benchmarking reconstruction methods that are consistent, faithful, and relightable in real outdoor environments.