Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Dilation Filtering for High-Efficiency Deraining

Deraining is a significant and fundamental computer vision task, aiming to remove the rain streaks and accumulations in an image or video captured under a rainy day. Existing deraining methods usually make heuristic assumptions of the rain model, which compels them to employ complex optimization or iterative refinement for high recovery quality. This, however, leads to time-consuming methods and affects the effectiveness for addressing rain patterns deviated from from the assumptions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient deraining method by formulating deraining as a predictive filtering problem without complex rain model assumptions. Specifically, we identify spatially-variant predictive filtering (SPFilt) that adaptively predicts proper kernels via a deep network to filter different individual pixels. Since the filtering can be implemented via well-accelerated convolution, our method can be significantly efficient. We further propose the EfDeRain+ that contains three main contributions to address residual rain traces, multi-scale, and diverse rain patterns without harming the efficiency. First, we propose the uncertainty-aware cascaded predictive filtering (UC-PFilt) that can identify the difficulties of reconstructing clean pixels via predicted kernels and remove the residual rain traces effectively. Second, we design the weight-sharing multi-scale dilated filtering (WS-MS-DFilt) to handle multi-scale rain streaks without harming the efficiency. Third, to eliminate the gap across diverse rain patterns, we propose a novel data augmentation method (i.e., RainMix) to train our deep models. By combining all contributions with sophisticated analysis on different variants, our final method outperforms baseline methods on four single-image deraining datasets and one video deraining dataset in terms of both recovery quality and speed.

EfficientDeRain: Learning Pixel-wise Dilation Filtering for High-Efficiency Single-Image Deraining

Single-image deraining is rather challenging due to the unknown rain model. Existing methods often make specific assumptions of the rain model, which can hardly cover many diverse circumstances in the real world, making them have to employ complex optimization or progressive refinement. This, however, significantly affects these methods' efficiency and effectiveness for many efficiency-critical applications. To fill this gap, in this paper, we regard the single-image deraining as a general image-enhancing problem and originally propose a model-free deraining method, i.e., EfficientDeRain, which is able to process a rainy image within 10~ms (i.e., around 6~ms on average), over 80 times faster than the state-of-the-art method (i.e., RCDNet), while achieving similar de-rain effects. We first propose the novel pixel-wise dilation filtering. In particular, a rainy image is filtered with the pixel-wise kernels estimated from a kernel prediction network, by which suitable multi-scale kernels for each pixel can be efficiently predicted. Then, to eliminate the gap between synthetic and real data, we further propose an effective data augmentation method (i.e., RainMix) that helps to train network for real rainy image handling.We perform comprehensive evaluation on both synthetic and real-world rainy datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. We release the model and code in https://github.com/tsingqguo/efficientderain.git.