# LW-ISP: A Lightweight Model with ISP and Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Denoising Algorithms with Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01313/) (2017)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07515/) (2019)
- [Real Image Denoising with Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07396/) (2019)
- [DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02470/) (2017)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [Variational Denoising Network: Toward Blind Noise Modeling and Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11314/) (2019)
- [Replacing Mobile Camera ISP with a Single Deep Learning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05509/) (2020)
- [ContextNet: Improving Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03191/) (2020)
- [DeepISP: Towards Learning an End-to-End Image Processing Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06724/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RPBA-Net: An Interpretable Residual Pyramid Bilateral Affine Network for RAW-Domain ISP Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03626/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deep learning (DL)-based methods of low-level tasks have many advantages over the traditional camera in terms of hardware prospects, error accumulation and imaging effects. Recently, the application of deep learning to replace the image signal processing (ISP) pipeline has appeared one after another; however, there is still a long way to go towards real landing. In this paper, we show the possibility of learning-based method to achieve real-time high-performance processing in the ISP pipeline. We propose LW-ISP, a novel architecture designed to implicitly learn the image mapping from RAW data to RGB image. Based on U-Net architecture, we propose the fine-grained attention module and a plug-and-play upsampling block suitable for low-level tasks. In particular, we design a heterogeneous distillation algorithm to distill the implicit features and reconstruction information of the clean image, so as to guide the learning of the student model. Our experiments demonstrate that LW-ISP has achieved a 0.38 dB improvement in PSNR compared to the previous best method, while the model parameters and calculation have been reduced by 23 times and 81 times. The inference efficiency has been accelerated by at least 15 times. Without bells and whistles, LW-ISP has achieved quite competitive results in ISP subtasks including image denoising and enhancement.