Single-image deraining network based on multistage feature fusion

Abstract

Single-image deraining is a classical problem in the field of low-level computer tasks. Most of the recent state-of-the-art image rain removal methods are trained on synthetic images, which have the problems of incomplete rain removal on real images and inability to process complex rain conditions. Based on these limitations, we propose a single-image deraining network based on multistage feature fusion (SIDNMFF). The network performs rain removal in four stages, with the first three stages using an improved encoder–decoder subnetwork for feature fusion to extract global and local information from the image, resulting in more detailed texture information of the obtained image. In the last stage, the network fuses the feature information extracted in the first three stages, performs feature extraction on the original resolution image, and finally outputs the final result of multistage deraining. The proposed method conducts a large number of comparative experiments on synthetic and real datasets as well as experiments on real datasets using no-reference metrics and the target detection method as the evaluation basis. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method achieves a satisfactory rain removal effect and outperforms the other methods.