Towards scale-free rain streak removal via self-supervised fractal band learning

Data-driven rain streak removal methods, which most of rely on synthesized paired data, usually come across the generalization problem when being applied in real cases. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning based rain streak removal method injected with self-supervision to improve the ability to remove rain streaks in various scales. To realize this goal, we made efforts in two aspects. First, considering that rain streak removal is highly correlated with texture characteristics, we create a fractal band learning (FBL) network based on frequency band recovery. It integrates commonly seen band feature operations with neural modules and effectively improves the capacity to capture discriminative features for deraining. Second, to further improve the generalization ability of FBL for rain streaks in various scales, we add cross-scale self-supervision to regularize the network training. The constraint forces the extracted features of inputs in different scales to be equivalent after rescaling. Therefore, FBL can offer similar responses based on solely image content without the interleave of scale and is capable to remove rain streaks in various scales. Extensive experiments in quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our FBL for rain streak removal, especially for the real cases where very large rain streaks exist, and prove the effectiveness of its each component. Our code will be public available at: https://github.com/flyywh/AAAI-2020-FBL-SS.