Raw-to-Raw: Mapping between Image Sensor Color Responses

Rang Nguyen, Dilip K. Prasad, Michael S. Brown; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 3398-3405

Camera images saved in raw format are being adopted in computer vision tasks since raw values represent minimally processed sensor responses. Camera manufacturers, however, have yet to adopt a standard for raw images and current raw-rgb values are device specific due to different sensors spectral sensitivities. This results in significantly different raw images for the same scene captured with different cameras. This paper focuses on estimating a mapping that can convert a raw image of an arbitrary scene and illumination from one camera's raw space to another. To this end, we examine various mapping strategies including linear and non-linear transformations applied both in a global and illumination-specific manner. We show that illumination-specific mappings give the best result, however, at the expense of requiring a large number of transformations. To address this issue, we introduce an illumination-independent mapping approach that uses white-balancing to assist in reducing the number of required transformations. We show that this approach achieves state-of-the-art results on a range of consumer cameras and images of arbitrary scenes and illuminations.