Rawgment: Noise-Accounted RAW Augmentation Enables Recognition in a Wide Variety of Environments

Image recognition models that can work in challenging environments (e.g., extremely dark, blurry, or high dynamic range conditions) must be useful. However, creating a training dataset for such environments is expensive and hard due to the difficulties of data collection and annotation. It is desirable if we could get a robust model without the need of hard-to-obtain dataset. One simple approach is to apply data augmentation such as color jitter and blur to standard RGB (sRGB) images in simple scenes. Unfortunately, this approach struggles to yield realistic images in terms of pixel intensity and noise distribution due to not considering the non-linearity of Image Signal Processor (ISP) and noise characteristics of an image sensor. Instead, we propose a noise-accounted RAW image augmentation method. In essence, color jitter and blur augmentation are applied to a RAW image before applying non-linear ISP, yielding realistic intensity. Furthermore, we introduce a noise amount alignment method that calibrates the domain gap in noise property caused by the augmentation. We show that our proposed noise-accounted RAW augmentation method doubles the image recognition accuracy in challenging environments only with simple training data.