Image deraining is a fundamental, yet not well-solved problem in computer vision and graphics. The traditional image deraining approaches commonly behave ineffectively in medium and heavy rain removal, while the learning-based ones lead to image degradations such as the loss of image details, halo artifacts and or color distortion. Unlike existing image deraining approaches that lack the detail-recovery mechanism, we propose an end-to-end detail-recovery image deraining network (termed a DRD-Net) for single images. We for the first time introduce two sub-networks with a comprehensive loss function which synergize to derain and recover the lost details caused by deraining. We have three key contributions. First, we present a rain residual network to remove rain streaks from the rainy images, which combines the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) operation with residual blocks to make full advantage of spatial contextual information. Second, we design a new connection style block, named structure detail context aggregation block (SDCAB), which aggregates context feature information and has a large reception field. Third, benefiting from the SDCAB, we construct a detail repair network to encourage the lost details to return for eliminating image degradations. We have validated our approach on four recognized datasets (three synthetic and one real-world). Both quantitative and qualitative comparisons show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art deraining methods in terms of the deraining robustness and detail accuracy. The source code has been available for public evaluation and use on GitHub.
@cite_26: Single image rain streak removal is an extremely challenging problem due to the presence of non-uniform rain densities in images. We present a novel density-aware multi-stream densely connected convolutional neural network-based algorithm, called DID-MDN, for joint rain density estimation and de-raining. The proposed method enables the network itself to automatically determine the rain-density information and then efficiently remove the corresponding rain-streaks guided by the estimated rain-density label. To better characterize rain-streaks with different scales and shapes, a multi-stream densely connected de-raining network is proposed which efficiently leverages features from different scales. Furthermore, a new dataset containing images with rain-density labels is created and used to train the proposed density-aware network. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods. In addition, an ablation study is performed to demonstrate the improvements obtained by different modules in the proposed method. The code can be downloaded at https: github.com hezhangsprinter DID-MDN
@cite_4: In this paper, we address a rain removal problem from a single image, even in the presence of heavy rain and rain accumulation. Our core ideas lie in our new rain image models and a novel deep learning architecture. We first modify the commonly used model, which is a linear combination of a rain streak layer and a background layer, by adding a binary map that locates rain streak regions. Second, we create a model consisting of a component representing rain accumulation (where individual streaks cannot be seen, and thus visually similar to mist or fog), and another component representing various shapes and directions of overlapping rain streaks, which normally happen in heavy rain. Based on the first model, we develop a multi-task deep learning architecture that learns the binary rain streak map, the appearance of rain streaks, and the clean background, which is our ultimate output. The additional binary map is critically beneficial, since its loss function can provide additional strong information to the network. In many cases though, rain streaks can be dense and large in their size, thus to obtain the clean background, we need spatial contextual information. For this, we utilize the dilated convolution. To handle rain accumulation (again, a phenomenon visually similar to mist or fog) and various shapes and directions of overlapping rain streaks, we propose an iterative information feedback (IIF) network that removes rain streaks and clears up the rain accumulation iteratively and progressively. Overall, this multi-task learning and iterative information feedback benefits each other and constitutes a network that is end-to-end trainable. Our extensive evaluation on real images, particularly on heavy rain, shows the effectiveness of our novel models and architecture, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods significantly.
@cite_7: Severe weather conditions such as rain and snow adversely affect the visual quality of images captured under such conditions thus rendering them useless for further usage and sharing. In addition, such degraded images drastically affect performance of vision systems. Hence, it is important to solve the problem of single image de-raining de-snowing. However, this is a difficult problem to solve due to its inherent ill-posed nature. Existing approaches attempt to introduce prior information to convert it into a well-posed problem. In this paper, we investigate a new point of view in addressing the single image de-raining problem. Instead of focusing only on deciding what is a good prior or a good framework to achieve good quantitative and qualitative performance, we also ensure that the de-rained image itself does not degrade the performance of a given computer vision algorithm such as detection and classification. In other words, the de-rained result should be indistinguishable from its corresponding clear image to a given discriminator. This criterion can be directly incorporated into the optimization framework by using the recently introduced conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs). To minimize artifacts introduced by GANs and ensure better visual quality, a new refined loss function is introduced. Based on this, we propose a novel single image de-raining method called Image De-raining Conditional General Adversarial Network (ID-CGAN), which considers quantitative, visual and also discriminative performance into the objective function. Experiments evaluated on synthetic images and real images show that the proposed method outperforms many recent state-of-the-art single image de-raining methods in terms of quantitative and visual performance.
@cite_15: Single image rain streaks removal is extremely important since rainy condition adversely affects many computer vision systems. Deep learning based methods have great success in image deraining tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel residual-guide feature fusion network, called ResGuideNet, for single image deraining that progressively predicts high-quality reconstruction while using fewer parameters than previous methods. Specifically, we propose a cascaded network and adopt residuals from shallower blocks to guide deeper blocks. We can obtain a coarse-to-fine estimation of negative residual as the blocks go deeper with this strategy. The outputs of different blocks are merged into the final reconstruction. We adopt recursive convolution to build each block and apply supervision to intermediate de-rained results. ResGuideNet is detachable to meet different rainy conditions. For images with light rain streaks and limited computational resource at test time, we can obtain a decent performance even with several building blocks. Experiments validate that ResGuideNet can benefit other low- and high-level vision tasks.
@cite_20: 
Later, @cite_7 presents a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) and use the perceptual loss to refine the results. @cite_4 develops a deep recurrent dilated joint rain streaks detection and removal network to remove the rain streaks. @cite_20 proposes the multi-stage networks based on the recurrent neural network architecture to remove rain streaks in different directions. @cite_26 presents a density-aware multi-stream connected network for deraining. By maintaining negative residual features, @cite_15 builds a residual-guided network for removing the rain streaks from single images.