Enhanced Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Single-Image Deraining

The problem of image rain removal has drawn widespread attention as the blurry images caused by rain streaks can degrade the performance of many computer vision tasks. Although exiting deep learning-based methods outperform most traditional methods, there are still unresolved issues in terms of performance. In this paper, we propose a novel enhanced attentive generative adversarial network named EAGAN to effectively remove the rain streaks and restore the image structural details at the same time. As rain streaks have different sizes and shapes, EAGAN utilizes a multiscale aggregation attention module (MAAM) to produce an attention map to guide the subsequent network to put conscious attention to rain regions. A symmetrical autoencoder with long-range skip-connections, squeeze-and-excitation (SE) modules, and non-local operation is further utilized to enhance the representation of the network. Finally, spectral normalization and a relativistic generative adversarial network (GAN) are further applied to improve the training stability and deraining performance. Both qualitative and quantitative validations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve a competitive performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.