Multi-weather Image Restoration via Domain Translation

Prashant W. Patil, Sunil Gupta, Santu Rana, Svetha Venkatesh, Subrahmanyam Murala; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 21696-21705

Weather degraded conditions such as rain, haze, snow, etc. may degrade the performance of most computer vision systems. Therefore, effective restoration of multi-weather degraded images is an essential prerequisite for successful functioning of such systems. The current multi-weather image restoration approaches utilize a model that is trained on a combined dataset consisting of individual images for rainy, snowy, and hazy weather degradations. These methods may face challenges when dealing with real-world situations where the images may have multiple, more intricate weather conditions. To address this issue, we propose a domain translation-based unified method for multi-weather image restoration. In this approach, the proposed network learns multiple weather degradations simultaneously, making it immune for real-world conditions. Specifically, we first propose an instance-level domain (weather) translation with multi-attentive feature learning approach to get different weather-degraded variants of the same scenario. Next, the original and translated images are used as input to the proposed novel multi-weather restoration network which utilizes a progressive multi-domain deformable alignment (PMDA) with cascaded multi-head attention (CMA). The proposed PMDA facilitates the restoration network to learn weather-invariant clues effectively. Further, PMDA and respective decoder features are merged via proposed CMA module for restoration. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world hazy, rainy, and snowy image databases clearly demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-weather image restoration methods. The URL for our code is provided in the supplementary material and will be made public upon acceptance.