Dark-ISP: Enhancing RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Object Detection

Low-light Object detection is crucial for many realworld applications but remains challenging due to degraded image quality. While recent studies have shown that RAW images offer superior potential over RGB images, existing approaches either use RAW-RGB images11In this paper, we use raw Bayer sensor data directly, while some methods quantize high-bit-depth 'Bayer RAW' into 'RAW-RGB' images with 8 bit-depth[10], [15]. We distinguish between these two terms. with information loss or employ complex frameworks. To address these, we propose a lightweight and self-adaptive Image Signal Processing (ISP) plugin, Dark-ISP, which directly processes Bayer RAW images in dark environments, enabling seamless end-to-end training for object detection. Our key innovations are: (1) We deconstruct conventional ISP pipelines into sequential linear (sensor calibration) and nonlinear (tone mapping) sub-modules, recasting them as differentiable components optimized through task-driven losses. Each module is equpped with content-aware adaptability and physics-informed priors, enabling automatic RAW-toRGB conversion aligned with detection objectives. (2) By exploiting the ISP pipeline's intrinsic cascade structure, we devise a Self-Boost mechanism that facilitates cooperation between sub-modules. Through extensive experiments on three RAW image datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art RGB- and RAW-based detection approaches, achieving superior results with minimal parameters in challenging low-light environments.