Single-Image Deraining via Recurrent Residual Multiscale Networks

Existing deraining approaches represent rain streaks with different rain layers and then separate the layers from the background image. However, because of the complexity of real-world rain, such as various densities, shapes, and directions of rain streaks, it is very difficult to decompose a rain image into clean background and rain layers. In this article, we develop a novel single-image deraining method based on residual multiscale pyramid to mitigate the difficulty of rain image decomposition. To be specific, we progressively remove rain streaks in a coarse-to-fine fashion, where heavy rain is first removed in coarse-resolution levels and then light rain is eliminated in fine-resolution levels. Furthermore, based on the observation that residuals between a restored image and its corresponding rain image give critical clues of rain streaks, we regard the residuals as an attention map to remove rains in the consecutive finer level image. To achieve a powerful yet compact deraining framework, we construct our network by recurrent layers and remove rain with the same network in different pyramid levels. In addition, we design a multiscale kernel selection network (MSKSN) to facilitate our single network to remove rain streaks at different levels. In this manner, we reduce 81% of the model parameters without decreasing deraining performance compared with our prior work. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmarks show that our approach achieves superior deraining performance compared with the state of the art.