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

• DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v35i2.16239
• Publication Date: 2022-09-08T18:03:46Z
• Authors: Qing Guo; Jingyang Sun; Felix Juefei-Xu; Lei Ma; Xiaofei Xie; Wei Feng; Yang Liu; Jianjun Zhao
• Keywords: 13. Climate action; Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces; Software Engineering

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, compelling them 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 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 the network for handling real rainy images. We perform a 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.