ReRAW: RGB-to-RAW Image Reconstruction via Stratified Sampling for Efficient Object Detection on the Edge

Edge-based computer vision models running on compact, resource-limited devices benefit greatly from using unprocessed, detail-rich RAW sensor data instead of processed RGB images. Training these models, however, necessitates large labeled RAW datasets, which are costly and often impractical to obtain. Thus, converting existing la- beled RGB datasets into sensor-specific RAW images becomes crucial for effective model training. In this paper, we introduce ReRAW, an RGB-to-RAW conversion model that achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance across five diverse RAW datasets. This is accomplished through ReRAW’s novel multi-head architecture predicting RAW image candidates in gamma space. The performance is further boosted by a stratified sampling-based training data selection heuristic, which helps the model better reconstruct brighter RAW pixels. We finally demonstrate that pretraining compact models on a combination of high-quality synthetic RAW datasets (such as generated by ReRAW) and ground-truth RAW images for downstream tasks like object detection, outperforms both standard RGB pipelines, and RAW fine-tuning of RGB-pretrained models for the same task. The code is available at: https://github.com/ SonyResearch/ReRAW