Metadata-Based RAW Reconstruction via Implicit Neural Functions

Leyi Li, Huijie Qiao, Qi Ye, Qinmin Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 18196-18205

Many low-level computer vision tasks are desirable to utilize the unprocessed RAW image as input, which remains the linear relationship between pixel values and scene radiance. Recent works advocate to embed the RAW image samples into sRGB images at capture time, and reconstruct the RAW from sRGB by these metadata when needed. However, there still exist some limitations on taking full use of the metadata. In this paper, instead of following the perspective of sRGB-to-RAW mapping, we reformulate the problem as mapping the 2D coordinates of the metadata to its RAW values conditioned on the corresponding sRGB values. With this novel formulation, we propose to reconstruct the RAW image with an implicit neural function, which achieves significant performance improvement (more than 10dB average PSNR) only with the uniform sampling. Compared with most deep learning-based approaches, our method is trained in a self-supervised way that requiring no pre-training on different camera ISPs. We perform further experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and show that our framework is also suitable for the task of guided super-resolution.