Semi-supervised transfer learning for image rain removal

Single image rain removal is a typical inverse problem in computer vision. The deep learning technique has been verified to be effective for this task and achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, previous deep learning methods need to pre-collect a large set of image pairs with/without synthesized rain for training, which tends to make the neural network be biased toward learning the specific patterns of the synthesized rain, while be less able to generalize to real test samples whose rain types differ from those in the training data. To this issue, this paper firstly proposes a semi-supervised learning paradigm toward this task. Different from traditional deep learning methods which only use supervised image pairs with/without synthesized rains, we further put real rainy images, without need of their clean ones, into the network training process. This is realized by elaborately formulating the residual between an input rainy image and its expected network output (clear image without rain) as a concise mixture of Gaussians distribution. The network is therefore trained to transfer to adapting the real rain pattern domain instead of only the synthesis rain domain, and thus both the short-of-training-sample and bias-to-supervised-sample issues can be evidently alleviated. Experiments on synthetic and real data verify the superiority of our model compared to the state-of-the-arts.