Raw Image Based Over-Exposure Correction Using Channel-Guidance Strategy

— Most existing methods for over-exposure in image correction are developed based on sRGB images, which can result in complex and non-linear degradation due to the image signal processing pipeline. By contrast, data-driven approaches based on RAW image data offer natural advantages for image processing tasks. RAW images, characterized by their near-linear correlation with scene radiance and enriched information content due to higher bit depth, demonstrate superior performance compared to sRGB-based techniques. Further, the spectral sensitivity characteristics intrinsic to digital camera sensors indicate that the blue and red channels in a Bayer pattern RAW image typically encompass more contextual information than the green channels. This property renders them less susceptible to overexposure, thereby making them more effective for data extraction in high dynamic range scenes. In this paper, we introduce a Channel-Guidance Network (CGNet) that leverages the benefits of RAW images for over-exposure correction. The CGNet estimates the properly-exposed sRGB image directly from the over-exposed RAW image in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we introduce a RAW-based channel-guidance branch to the U-net-based backbone, which exploits the color channel intensity prior of RAW images to achieve superior over-exposure correction performance. To further facilitate research in over-exposure correction, we present synthetic and real-world over-exposure correction benchmark datasets. These datasets comprise a large set of paired RAW and sRGB images across a variety of scenarios. Experiments on our RAW-sRGB datasets validate the advantages of our RAW-based channel guidance strategy and proposed CGNet over state-of-the-art sRGB-based methods on over-exposure correction. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/whiteknight-WJN/CGNet.