Single image rain streaks removal: a review and an exploration

Recently, rain streaks removal from a single image has attracted much research attention to alleviate the degenerated performance of computer vision tasks implemented on rainy images. In this paper, we provide a thorough review for current single-image-based rain removal techniques, which can be mainly categorized into three classes: early filter-based, conventional prior-based, and recent deep learning-based approaches. Furthermore, inspired by the rationality of current deep learning-based methods and insightful characteristics underlying rain shapes, we build a specific coarse-to-fine deraining network architecture, which can finely deliver the rain structures and progressively removes rain streaks from the input image, accordingly. The superiority of the proposed network is substantiated by experiments implemented on synthetic and real rainy images both visually and quantitatively, as compared with comprehensive state-of-the-art methods along this line. Especially, it is verified that the proposed network possesses better generalization capability on real rainy images, implying its potential usefulness for this task.