Removing Rain Streaks from Visual Image Using a Combination of Bilateral Filter and Generative Adversarial Network

Images acquired using vision sensors are easily affected by environmental limitations, especially rain streaks. These streaks will seriously reduce image quality, which, in turn, reduces the accuracy of the algorithms that use the resulting images in vision sensor systems. In this paper, we proposed a method that combined the bilateral filter with the generative adversarial network to eliminate the interference of rain streaks. Unlike other methods that use all the information in an image as the input to the generative adversarial network, we used a bilateral filter to preprocess and separate the high frequency part of the original image. The generator for the high-frequency layer of the image was designed to generate an image with no rain streaks. The high-frequency information of the image was used in a high-frequency global discriminator designed to measure the authenticity of the generated image from multiple perspectives. We also designed a loss function based on the structural similarity index to further improve the effect of removal of the rain streaks. An ablation experiment proved the validity of the method. We also compared images in synthetic and real-world datasets. Our method could retain more image information, and the generated image was clearer.