RawGen: Learning Camera Raw Image Generation
Cameras capture scene-referred linear raw images, which are processed by onboard image signal processors (ISPs) into display-referred 8-bit sRGB outputs. Although raw data is more faithful for low-level vision tasks, collecting large-scale raw datasets remains a major bottleneck, as existing datasets are limited and tied to specific camera hardware. Generative models offer a promising way to address this scarcity -- however, existing diffusion frameworks are designed to synthesize photo-finished sRGB images rather than physically consistent linear representations. This paper presents RawGen, to our knowledge the first diffusion-based framework enabling text-to-raw generation for arbitrary target cameras, alongside sRGB-to-raw inversion. RawGen leverages the generative priors of large-scale sRGB diffusion models to synthesize physically meaningful linear outputs, such as CIE XYZ or camera-specific raw representations, via specialized processing in latent and pixel spaces. To handle unknown and diverse ISP pipelines and photo-finishing effects in diffusion-model training data, we build a many-to-one inverse-ISP dataset where multiple sRGB renditions of the same scene generated using diverse ISP parameters are anchored to a common scene-referred target. Fine-tuning a conditional denoiser and specialized decoder on this dataset allows RawGen to obtain camera-centric linear reconstructions that effectively invert the rendering pipeline. We demonstrate RawGen's superior performance over traditional inverse-ISP methods that assume a fixed ISP. Furthermore, we show that augmenting training pipelines with RawGen's scalable, text-driven synthetic data can benefit downstream low-level vision tasks.
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Dongyoung Kim
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Junyong Lee
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Abhijith Punnappurath
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Mahmoud Afifi
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Sangmin Han
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Alex Levinshtein
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Michael S. Brown
RawGen: Learning Camera Raw Image Generation
Cameras capture scene-referred linear raw images, which are processed by onboard image signal processors (ISPs) into display-referred 8-bit sRGB outputs. Although raw data is more faithful for low-level vision tasks, collecting large-scale raw datasets remains a major bottleneck, as existing datasets are limited and tied to specific camera hardware. Generative models offer a promising way to address this scarcity -- however, existing diffusion frameworks are designed to synthesize photo-finished sRGB images rather than physically consistent linear representations. This paper presents RawGen, to our knowledge the first diffusion-based framework enabling text-to-raw generation for arbitrary target cameras, alongside sRGB-to-raw inversion. RawGen leverages the generative priors of large-scale sRGB diffusion models to synthesize physically meaningful linear outputs, such as CIE XYZ or camera-specific raw representations, via specialized processing in latent and pixel spaces. To handle unknown and diverse ISP pipelines and photo-finishing effects in diffusion-model training data, we build a many-to-one inverse-ISP dataset where multiple sRGB renditions of the same scene generated using diverse ISP parameters are anchored to a common scene-referred target. Fine-tuning a conditional denoiser and specialized decoder on this dataset allows RawGen to obtain camera-centric linear reconstructions that effectively invert the rendering pipeline. We demonstrate RawGen's superior performance over traditional inverse-ISP methods that assume a fixed ISP. Furthermore, we show that augmenting training pipelines with RawGen's scalable, text-driven synthetic data can benefit downstream low-level vision tasks.
RawGen is a diffusion-based framework for generating physically consistent linear raw images from text prompts and inverting sRGB to raw representations, overcoming limitations of traditional inverse-ISP methods through specialized latent space processing and a many-to-one inverse-ISP dataset.
diffusion models text-to-raw generation inverse-ISP latent space pixel space conditional denoiser specialized decoder camera-centric linear reconstructions generative priors raw data sRGB linear raw images inverse-ISP dataset photo-finishing effects scene-referred display-referred