English

RAWIC: Bit-Depth Adaptive Lossless Raw Image Compression

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-31 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.28105,
  title  = {RAWIC: Bit-Depth Adaptive Lossless Raw Image Compression},
  author = {Chunhang Zheng and Tongda Xu and Mingli Xie and Yan Wang and Dou Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.28105},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by ICME 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:43:36.087Z