Densely connected multi-scale de-raining net

Abstract

Rainy images severely degrade the visibility and make many computer vision algorithms invalid. Hence, it is necessary to remove rain streaks from single image. In this paper, we propose a novel network to handle with single image de-raining, which includes two modules: (a) multi-scale kernels de-raining layer and (b) multi-scale feature maps de-raining layer. Specifically, as spatial contextual information is important for single image de-raining, we develop a multi-scale kernels de-raining layer, which can utilize the multi-scale kernel that has receptive fields with different sizes to further capture the contextual information and these features are fused to learn the primary rain streaks structures. Moreover, we illustrate that convolution layers at different scales have similar structure of rain streaks by statistical pixel histogram and they can be processed in the same operation. So, we deal with the rain streaks information at different scales by using multi-scale kernels de-raining layers with shared parameters, where we call this operation as multi-scale feature maps de-raining layer. Finally, we employ dense connections to connect multi-scale feature maps de-raining layers to maximize the information flow along features from different levels. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of proposed method compared with several state-of-the-art de-raining methods, while the parameters of our proposed method are greatly reduced that benefits from the proposed shared parameters strategy at different scales