RAWDet-7: A Multi-Scenario Benchmark for Object Detection and Description on Quantized RAW Images

TL;DR

RAWDet-7 introduces a large-scale RAW image dataset with diverse scenarios, enabling research on object detection and description that leverages sensor-level data often lost in processed images, especially under low-bit quantization.

Contribution

The paper presents RAWDet-7, a comprehensive RAW image dataset with annotations and descriptions, supporting multi-scenario object detection and description research under various quantization levels.

Findings

Enables evaluation of detection and description on RAW images across different cameras and conditions.

Supports analysis of low-bit quantization effects on model performance.

Provides a benchmark for future research in RAW image-based vision tasks.

Abstract

Most vision models are trained on RGB images processed through ISP pipelines optimized for human perception, which can discard sensor-level information useful for machine reasoning. RAW images preserve unprocessed scene data, enabling models to leverage richer cues for both object detection and object description, capturing fine-grained details, spatial relationships, and contextual information often lost in processed images. To support research in this domain, we introduce RAWDet-7, a large-scale dataset of ~25k training and 7.6k test RAW images collected across diverse cameras, lighting conditions, and environments, densely annotated for seven object categories following MS-COCO and LVIS conventions. In addition, we provide object-level descriptions derived from the corresponding high-resolution sRGB images, facilitating the study of object-level information preservation under RAW image processing and low-bit quantization. The dataset allows evaluation under simulated 4-bit, 6-bit, and 8-bit quantization, reflecting realistic sensor constraints, and provides a benchmark for studying detection performance, description quality & detail, and generalization in low-bit RAW image processing. Dataset & code upon acceptance.