There are complex technical reasons why "ICC Profiles" are not the ideal solution for digital camera calibration. One is they limit extended white balance and highlight recovery algorithms, which perform best when applied in the same processing stage as the first color matrix in the processing pipe. If this matrix stage is buried somewhere in a black box ICC profile, then it means that extended highlight recovery algorithm would need to be moved somewhere else in the processing pipe, where it might not perform as well.

There is also a fundamental problem with ICC profiles in that the ICC profile connection space uses "output referred" colorimetric values, whereas raw converters needs "scene referred" colorimetric values so they can perform the mapping between scene referred values and output referred values under user, rather than profile, control.

[My previous project at Adobe was to write ACE, the "Adobe Color Engine", which is Adobe's ICC profile processing software now used by most Adobe software. I also wrote the internal Adobe software that created the "v2" color profiles that are Adobe's standard set of CMYK profiles. So I do understand ICC profiles and their limitiations.]

Thomas Knoll.