Unsupervised Single-Image Reflection Separation Using Perceptual Deep Image Priors

Reflections often degrade the quality of the image by obstructing the background scene. This is not desirable for everyday users, and it negatively impacts the performance of multimedia applications that process images with reflections. Most current methods for removing reflections utilize supervised-learning models. However, these models require an extensive number of image pairs to perform well, especially on natural images with reflection, which is difficult to achieve in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised framework for single-image reflection separation. Instead of learning from a large dataset, we optimize the parameters of two cross-coupled deep convolutional networks on a target image to generate two exclusive background and reflection layers. In particular, we design a new architecture of the network to embed semantic features extracted from a pre-trained deep classification network, which gives more meaningful separation similar to human perception. Quantitative and qualitative results on commonly used datasets in the literature show that our method's performance is at least on par with the state-of-the-art supervised methods and, occasionally, better without requiring large training datasets. Our results also show that our method significantly outperforms the closest unsupervised method in the literature for removing reflections from single images.