Rain Streak Removal Using Layer Priors

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.