Non-locally Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Network for Single Image De-raining

Single image rain streaks removal has recently witnessed substantial progress due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks. However, existing deep learning based methods either focus on the entrance and exit of the network by decomposing the input image into high and low frequency information and employing residual learning to reduce the mapping range, or focus on the introduction of cascaded learning scheme to decompose the task of rain streaks removal into multi-stages. These methods treat the convolutional neural network as an encapsulated end-to-end mapping module without deepening into the rationality and superiority of neural network design. In this paper, we delve into an effective end-to-end neural network structure for stronger feature expression and spatial correlation learning. Specifically, we propose a non-locally enhanced encoder-decoder network framework, which consists of a pooling indices embedded encoder-decoder network to efficiently learn increasingly abstract feature representation for more accurate rain streaks modeling while perfectly preserving the image detail. The proposed encoder-decoder framework is composed of a series of non-locally enhanced dense blocks that are designed to not only fully exploit hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers but also well capture the long-distance dependencies and structural information. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively remove rain-streaks on rainy image of various densities while well preserving the image details, which achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 201

Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?

Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy by 7.72%.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System