  Most existing single image deraining methods require learning supervised
models from a large set of paired synthetic training data, which limits their
generality, scalability and practicality in real-world multimedia applications.
Besides, due to lack of labeled-supervised constraints, directly applying
existing unsupervised frameworks to the image deraining task will suffer from
low-quality recovery. Therefore, we propose an Unsupervised Deraining
Generative Adversarial Network (UD-GAN) to tackle above problems by introducing
self-supervised constraints from the intrinsic statistics of unpaired rainy and
clean images. Specifically, we firstly design two collaboratively optimized
modules, namely Rain Guidance Module (RGM) and Background Guidance Module
(BGM), to take full advantage of rainy image characteristics: The RGM is
designed to discriminate real rainy images from fake rainy images which are
created based on outputs of the generator with BGM. Simultaneously, the BGM
exploits a hierarchical Gaussian-Blur gradient error to ensure background
consistency between rainy input and de-rained output. Secondly, a novel
luminance-adjusting adversarial loss is integrated into the clean image
discriminator considering the built-in luminance difference between real clean
images and derained images. Comprehensive experiment results on various
benchmarking datasets and different training settings show that UD-GAN
outperforms existing image deraining methods in both quantitative and
qualitative comparisons.
