# RAW-Adapter: Adapting Pre-trained Visual Model to Camera RAW Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14802 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14802/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free Adaption of CLIP for Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09519/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [Replacing Mobile Camera ISP with a Single Deep Learning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05509/) (2020)
- [Memory-Efficient Incremental Learning Through Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00713/) (2020)
- [Invertible Image Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15061/) (2021)
- [DeepISP: Towards Learning an End-to-End Image Processing Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06724/) (2018)
- [You Only Need 90K Parameters to Adapt Light: A Light Weight Transformer for Image Enhancement and Exposure Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14871/) (2022)
- [Mobile Computational Photography: A Tour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09000/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01187/) (2025)
- [Towards RAW Object Detection in Diverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15678/) (2024)
- [Dark-ISP: Enhancing RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09183/) (2025)
- [Beyond RGB: Adaptive Parallel Processing for RAW Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13163/) (2025)
- [RAWMamba: Unified sRGB-to-RAW De-rendering With State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11717/) (2024)
- [RAWild: Sensor-Agnostic RAW Object Detection via Physics-Guided Curve and Grid Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05941/) (2026)
- [SimROD: A Simple Baseline for Raw Object Detection with Global and Local Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07101/) (2025)
- [RAW-Adapter: Adapting Pre-trained Visual Model to Camera RAW Images and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17027/) (2025)
- [Task-Aware Image Signal Processor for Advanced Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13762/) (2025)
- [RAWDet-7: A Multi-Scenario Benchmark for Object Detection and Description on Quantized RAW Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03760/) (2026)
- [UniISP: A Unified ISP Framework for Both Human and Machine Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07359/) (2026)
- [SemiISP/SemiIE: Semi-Supervised Image Signal Processor and Image Enhancement Leveraging One-to-Many Mapping sRGB-to-RAW](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02345/) (2025)
- [Spatial-Frequency Aware for Object Detection in RAW Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01396/) (2025)
- [Raw-JPEG Adapter: Efficient Raw Image Compression with JPEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19624/) (2025)
- [MERIT: Multi-domain Efficient RAW Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20836/) (2026)
- [Making the Discrete Continuous: Synthetic RAW Augmentations for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Person Detection Performance in Low Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22455/) (2026)
- [FreqAdapt: Frequency-Adaptive Processing for RAW Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03385/) (2026)
- [Real-Time Scene-Adaptive Tone Mapping for High-Dynamic Range Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30400/) (2026)
- [FujinSplat: Seeing Through Smoke with RAW-Domain Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06017/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

sRGB images are now the predominant choice for pre-training visual models in computer vision research, owing to their ease of acquisition and efficient storage. Meanwhile, the advantage of RAW images lies in their rich physical information under variable real-world challenging lighting conditions. For computer vision tasks directly based on camera RAW data, most existing studies adopt methods of integrating image signal processor (ISP) with backend networks, yet often overlook the interaction capabilities between the ISP stages and subsequent networks. Drawing inspiration from ongoing adapter research in NLP and CV areas, we introduce RAW-Adapter, a novel approach aimed at adapting sRGB pre-trained models to camera RAW data. RAW-Adapter comprises input-level adapters that employ learnable ISP stages to adjust RAW inputs, as well as model-level adapters to build connections between ISP stages and subsequent high-level networks. Additionally, RAW-Adapter is a general framework that could be used in various computer vision frameworks. Abundant experiments under different lighting conditions have shown our algorithm's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency across a range of real-world and synthetic datasets.