Learning Rain Location Prior for Nighttime Deraining

Rain can significantly degrade image quality and visibility, making deraining a critical area of research in computer vision. Despite recent progress in learning-based deraining methods, there is a lack of focus on nighttime deraining due to the unique challenges posed by non-uniform local illuminations from artificial light sources. Rain streaks in these scenes have diverse appearances that are tightly related to their relative positions to light sources, making it difficult for existing deraining methods to effectively handle them. In this paper, we highlight the importance of rain streak location information in nighttime deraining. Specifically, we propose a Rain Location Prior (RLP) that is learned implicitly from rainy images using a recurrent residual model. This learned prior contains location information of rain streaks and, when injected into deraining models, can significantly improve their performance. To further improve the effectiveness of the learned prior, we also propose a Rain Prior Injection Module (RPIM) to modulate the prior before injection, increasing the importance of features within rain streak areas. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by about 1dB and effectively improves the performance of deraining models. We also evaluate our method on real night rainy images to show the capability to handle real scenes with fully synthetic data for training. Our method represents a significant step forward in the area of nighttime deraining and highlights the importance of location information in this challenging problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zkawfanx/RLP.