Improving De-raining Generalization via Neural Reorganization

Most existing image de-raining networks could only learn fixed mapping rules between paired rainy/clean images on single synthetic dataset and then stay static for lifetime. However, since single synthetic dataset merely provides a partial view for the distribution of rain streaks, deep models well trained on an individual synthetic dataset tend to overfit on this biased distribution. This leads to the inability of these methods to well generalize to complex and changeable real-world rainy scenes, thus limiting their practical applications. In this paper, we try for the first time to accumulate the de-raining knowledge from multiple synthetic datasets on a single network parameter set to improve the de-raining generalization of deep networks. To achieve this goal, we explore Neural Reorganization (NR) to allow the de-raining network to keep a subtle stability-plasticity trade-off rather than naive stabilization after training phase. Specifically, we design our NR algorithm by borrowing the synaptic consolidation mechanism in the biological brain and knowledge distillation. Equipped with our NR algorithm, the deep model can be trained on a list of synthetic rainy datasets by overcoming catastrophic forgetting, making it a general-version de-raining network. Extensive experimental validation shows that due to the successful accumulation of de-raining knowledge, our proposed method can not only process multiple synthetic datasets consistently, but also achieve state-of-the-art results when dealing with real-world rainy images.