LPN-IDD: A Lightweight Pyramid Network for Image Deraining and Detection

One of the challenges in image processing involves single image deraining (SID). Existing methods do not exploit images at multi-scales and often overlook spatial and channel information. These methods fail to account for different rain conditions, leading to challenges in effectively removing a wide range of rain streak patterns, such as diverse directional or dense streaks. Moreover, they often result in the loss of fine texture details or a blurred background in the process of eliminating rain streaks from images captured in heavy rain. Mostly state-of-the-art (SOTA) deraining models achieve higher performance in removing rain from rainy images but at the expense of a high number of parameters, which results in computational complexity and memory requirements. Furthermore, they also do not consider high-level visioned evaluation metrics to perform deep evaluations of the proposed models. In this paper, a simple lightweight network with few parameters and relatively shallow depth is proposed by fusing the traditional Gaussian-Laplacian pyramid technique with the attention module. We propose a novel attention-based lightweight pyramid network for image deraining and detection (LPN-IDD) to achieve better deraining performance. The proposed model includes a dual attention module integrated with the Gaussian-Laplacian pyramids network. In LPN-IDD, different levels of Laplacian pyramids can extract multi-scale features to adapt to different shapes and types of rain streaks. Residual and recursive blocks are used in each subnetwork along with dual attention blocks to resist the occlusion or texture feature while suppressing unnecessary features. Extensive experimentation performed on the SID synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in image deraining tasks. For deep evaluation of the proposed methodology, object detection models including faster-RCNN, YOLO-V3, YOLO-V7 are used along with full reference evaluation metrics.