Single-image-based rain streak removal using multidimensional variational mode decomposition and bilateral filter

The removal of rain streaks is critical for cameras in rainy weather conditions. Traditional single-image-based methods suffer from the defects of losing detail information and being time consuming. This study presents a single-image-based rain streak removal using multidimensional variational mode decomposition (MVMD). Rainy image is decomposed using MVMD into several subimages with specific directional and frequency characteristics. Thus, the rain streak components will be limited to one or two subimages, which are called rainy subimages. Rainy subimages are determined based on the directional characteristics. The subimages are narrow band-limited. Therefore, the rainy subimages contain few outline and detail information with other frequency and directional characteristics. Thus, the derain procedure that is performed on the rainy subimages will preserve most of the detailed information. The rain components are removed from the rainy subimages by a bilateral filter. The rain components can be successfully removed from the rainy image through the summation of the subimages without rain components and the filtered rainy subimages. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good rain removal capability while retaining most of the details with a lower running time compared with other existing methods. (C) 2017 SPIE and IS&T