Single Image Deraining with Continuous Rain Density Estimation

Single image deraining (SIDR) often suffers from over/under deraining due to the nonuniformity of rain densities and the variety of raindrop scales. In this paper, we propose a continuous density-guided network (CODE-Net) for SIDR. Particularly, it is composed of a rain streak extractor and a denoiser, where the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) is exploited to filter out noises from the extracted rain streaks. Inspired by the reweighted iterative soft-threshold (ISTA) for CSC, we address the problem of continuous rain density estimation by learning the weights with channel attention blocks from sparse codes. We further develop a multiscale strategy to depict rain streaks appearing at different scales. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the superiority of our methods over recent state-of-the-arts, in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results. Additionally, instead of quantizing rain density with several levels, our CODE-Net can provide continuous-valued estimations of rain densities, which is more desirable in real applications.