text: We present a supervised technique for learning to remove rain from images without using synthetic rain software. The method is based on a two-stage data distillation approach: 1) A rainy image is first paired with a coarsely derained version using on a simple filtering technique ("rain-to-clean"). 2) Then a clean image is randomly matched with the rainy soft-labeled pair. Through a shared deep neural network, the rain that is removed from the first image is then added to the clean image to generate a second pair ("clean-to-rain"). The neural network simultaneously learns to map both images such that high resolution structure in the clean images can inform the deraining of the rainy images. Demonstrations show that this approach can address those visual characteristics of rain not easily synthesized by software in the usual way.
  @cite_14: 
  @cite_4: This paper addresses the problem of rain streak removal from a single image. Rain streaks impair visibility of an image and introduce undesirable interference that can severely affect the performance of computer vision algorithms. Rain streak removal can be formulated as a layer decomposition problem, with a rain streak layer superimposed on a background layer containing the true scene content. Existing decomposition methods that address this problem employ either dictionary learning methods or impose a low rank structure on the appearance of the rain streaks. While these methods can improve the overall visibility, they tend to leave too many rain streaks in the background image or over-smooth the background image. In this paper, we propose an effective method that uses simple patch-based priors for both the background and rain layers. These priors are based on Gaussian mixture models and can accommodate multiple orientations and scales of the rain streaks. This simple approach removes rain streaks better than the existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively. We overview our method and demonstrate its effectiveness over prior work on a number of examples.
  @cite_22: In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank appearance model for removing rain streaks. Different from previous work, our method needs neither rain pixel detection nor time-consuming dictionary learning stage. Instead, as rain streaks usually reveal similar and repeated patterns on imaging scene, we propose and generalize a low-rank model from matrix to tensor structure in order to capture the spatio-temporally correlated rain streaks. With the appearance model, we thus remove rain streaks from image video (and also other high-order image structure) in a unified way. Our experimental results demonstrate competitive (or even better) visual quality and efficient run-time in comparison with state of the art.
  @cite_16: Rain removal from a video is a challenging problem and has been recently investigated extensively. Nevertheless, the problem of rain removal from a single image was rarely studied in the literature, where no temporal information among successive images can be exploited, making the problem very challenging. In this paper, we propose a single-image-based rain removal framework via properly formulating rain removal as an image decomposition problem based on morphological component analysis. Instead of directly applying a conventional image decomposition technique, the proposed method first decomposes an image into the low- and high-frequency (HF) parts using a bilateral filter. The HF part is then decomposed into a “rain component” and a “nonrain component” by performing dictionary learning and sparse coding. As a result, the rain component can be successfully removed from the image while preserving most original image details. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.
  @cite_25: 
  @cite_20: An adaptive rain streak removal algorithm for a single image is proposed in this work. We observe that a typical rain streak has an elongated elliptical shape with a vertical orientation. Thus, we first detect rain streak regions by analyzing the rotation angle and the aspect ratio of the elliptical kernel at each pixel location. We then perform the nonlocal means filtering on the detected rain streak regions by selecting nonlocal neighbor pixels and their weights adaptively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm removes rain streaks more efficiently and provides higher restored image qualities than conventional algorithms.
  @cite_11: Visual distortions on images caused by bad weather conditions can have a negative impact on the performance of many outdoor vision systems. One often seen bad weather is rain which causes significant yet complex local intensity fluctuations in images. The paper aims at developing an effective algorithm to remove visual effects of rain from a single rainy image, i.e. separate the rain layer and the de-rained image layer from an rainy image. Built upon a non-linear generative model of rainy image, namely screen blend mode, we proposed a dictionary learning based algorithm for single image de-raining. The basic idea is to sparsely approximate the patches of two layers by very high discriminative codes over a learned dictionary with strong mutual exclusivity property. Such discriminative sparse codes lead to accurate separation of two layers from their non-linear composite. The experiments showed that the proposed method outperformed the existing single image de-raining methods on tested rain images.
summary: Single image de-raining is a challenging and ill-posed task. Traditional methods are designed by using handcrafted image features to describe physical characteristics of rain streaks, or exploring prior knowledge to make the problem easier. Kang @cite_16 attempt to separate rain streaks from the high frequency layer by sparse coding. In @cite_22 @cite_25 , low-rank assumptions are used to model and separate rain streaks. Kim @cite_20 first detect rain streaks and then remove them with the nonlocal mean filter. Luo @cite_11 propose a framework to rain removal based on discriminative sparse coding. Li @cite_4 exploit Gaussian mixture models to separate the rain streaks. A limitation of many of these methods is that they tend to over-smooth the resulting image output @cite_16 @cite_14 .