RAWIC: Bit-Depth Adaptive Lossless Raw Image Compression
About
Raw images preserve linear sensor measurements and high bit-depth information crucial for advanced vision tasks and photography applications, yet their storage remains challenging due to large file sizes, varying bit depths, and sensor-dependent characteristics. Existing learned lossless compression methods mainly target 8-bit sRGB images, while raw reconstruction approaches are inherently lossy and rely on camera-specific assumptions. To address these challenges, we introduce RAWIC, a bit-depth-adaptive learned lossless compression framework for Bayer-pattern raw images. We first convert single-channel Bayer data into a four-channel RGGB format and partition it into patches. For each patch, we compute its bit depth and use it as auxiliary input to guide compression. A bit-depth-adaptive entropy model is then designed to estimate patch distributions conditioned on their bit depths. This architecture enables a single model to handle raw images from diverse cameras and bit depths. Experiments show that RAWIC consistently surpasses traditional lossless codecs, achieving an average 7.7% bitrate reduction over JPEG-XL. Our code is available at https://github.com/chunbaobao/RAWIC.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lossless Image Compression | Kodak sRGB 8-bit (test) | Encoding Time (sec)0.96 | 28 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | Kodak (test) | bpsp8.47 | 25 | |
| Lossless RGB Image Compression | DIV2K (test) | BPP7.54 | 9 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | NUS Canon 1Ds MkIII (test) | Bits Per Pixel (bpp)6.79 | 8 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | NUS Canon 600D (test) | bpp7.47 | 8 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | NUS Olympus EPL6 (test) | Bits Per Pixel (bpp)5.11 | 8 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | NUS Panasonic GX1 (test) | Bits Per Pixel (bpp)5.99 | 8 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | NUS Samsung NX2000 (test) | Bits Per Pixel (bpp)5.83 | 8 | |
| Lossless Image Compression | RAISE (test) | BPP7.8 | 8 | |
| Lossless RGB Image Compression | CLIC.m (test) | BPP6.42 | 8 |