  Most of the existing learning-based deraining methods are supervisedly
trained on synthetic rainy-clean pairs. The domain gap between the synthetic
and real rain makes them less generalized to complex real rainy scenes.
Moreover, the existing methods mainly utilize the property of the image or rain
layers independently, while few of them have considered their mutually
exclusive relationship. To solve above dilemma, we explore the intrinsic
intra-similarity within each layer and inter-exclusiveness between two layers
and propose an unsupervised non-local contrastive learning (NLCL) deraining
method. The non-local self-similarity image patches as the positives are
tightly pulled together, rain patches as the negatives are remarkably pushed
away, and vice versa. On one hand, the intrinsic self-similarity knowledge
within positive/negative samples of each layer benefits us to discover more
compact representation; on the other hand, the mutually exclusive property
between the two layers enriches the discriminative decomposition. Thus, the
internal self-similarity within each layer (similarity) and the external
exclusive relationship of the two layers (dissimilarity) serving as a generic
image prior jointly facilitate us to unsupervisedly differentiate the rain from
clean image. We further discover that the intrinsic dimension of the non-local
image patches is generally higher than that of the rain patches. This motivates
us to design an asymmetric contrastive loss to precisely model the compactness
discrepancy of the two layers for better discriminative decomposition. In
addition, considering that the existing real rain datasets are of low quality,
either small scale or downloaded from the internet, we collect a real
large-scale dataset under various rainy kinds of weather that contains
high-resolution rainy images.
