cs.CVSep 29, 2026

Learning from synthetic photorealistic raindrop for single image raindrop removal

Authors: Zhixiang Hao, Shaodi You, Yu Li, Kunming Li, Feng Lu

Organizations: State Key Laboratory of VR Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing, China · 61-CSIRO · Tencent · Australian National University · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Raindrops adhered to camera lens or windshield are inevitable in rainy scenes and can become an issue for many computer vision systems such as autonomous driving. Because raindrop appearance is affected by too many parameters, therefore it is unlikely to find an effective model based solution. Learning based methods are also problematic, because traditional learning method cannot properly model the complex appearance. Whereas deep learning method lacks sufficiently large and realistic training data. To solve it, in our work, we propose the first photo-realistic dataset of synthetic adherent raindrops for training. The rendering is physics based with consideration of the water dynamic, geometric and photometry. The dataset contains various types of rainy scenes and particularly the rainy driving scenes. Based on the modeling of raindrop imagery, we introduce a detection network which has the awareness of the raindrop refraction as well as its blurring. Based on that, we propose the removal network that can well recover the image structure. Rigorous experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed framework.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Mar 17, 2026cs.CV

Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections: A New Benchmark and A Novel Pipeline

When capturing images through glass surfaces or windshields on rainy days, raindrops and reflections frequently co-occur to significantly reduce the visibility of captured images. This practical problem lacks attention and needs to be resolved urgently. Prior de-raindrop, de-reflection, and all-in-one models have failed to address this composite degradation. To this end, we first formally define the unified removal of raindrops and reflections (UR3^3) task for the first time and construct a real-shot dataset, namely RainDrop and ReFlection (RDRF), which provides a new benchmark with substantial, high-quality, diverse image pairs. Then, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework (i.e., DiffUR3^3) with several target designs to address this challenging task. By leveraging the powerful generative prior, DiffUR3^3 successfully removes both types of degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark and on challenging in-the-wild images.
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

GSRAIN: Physically Calibrated High-/Low-Frequency Rainfall Synthesis for 3D Gaussian Driving Scenes

Existing rainfall simulation methods for autonomous driving remain limited in physical controllability and multi-view consistency. This paper presents GSRAIN, a high-/low-frequency rainfall synthesis method for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) driving scenes. GSRAIN constructs a high-frequency raindrop model from measured rainfall data and generates low-frequency rainy appearance using a geometry-aware single-step diffusion model. The two effects are then fused in a unified 3DGS scene, enabling rainfall-intensity control over the range of 0--13~mm/h. The proposed method achieves a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 149.09, outperforming CycleGAN-Turbo (155.71) and WeatherEdit (157.94). Object-detection and closed-loop driving experiments further show that the generated scenes expose scene-dependent performance changes of the evaluated algorithms under controllable rainfall. These results indicate that GSRAIN provides an effective approach for constructing physically controllable, repeatable, and closed-loop-compatible rainy-weather test scenes for autonomous driving.
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

RainDancer: RGB-Event Video Deraining with Rain-Oriented Spiking Dynamics

Video deraining aims to recover clean visual content from rainy videos for reliable perception under adverse weather. Existing methods mainly rely on RGB sequences and temporal redundancy, but RGB-only restoration remains ambiguous in dynamic rainy scenes, where rain streaks, textures, boundaries, motion, and occlusions may share similar visual patterns. Event cameras provide complementary motion-sensitive cues with high temporal resolution, but event streams also contain sensor noise and background-triggered responses, so direct RGB-Event fusion may introduce cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose RainDancer, a progressive RGB-Event video deraining framework based on a decompose-before-interact paradigm. The core idea is to separate rain and background components within each modality before cross-modal interaction. In the RGB branch, frame features are progressively decomposed into rain and background representations. In the event branch, a rain-oriented spiking neural network module captures sparse and bursty event dynamics associated with rain motion. Component-level fusion is then performed between semantically aligned representations for structure preservation and rain suppression. We further introduce event-domain supervision to regularize sparse event reconstruction, structural consistency, and gradient orientation. Experiments on synthetic and real RGB-Event video deraining datasets demonstrate superior quantitative performance, visual quality, and downstream perception robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/AE86-plus/RainDancer.