  Image deraining is a typical low-level image restoration task, which aims at
decomposing the rainy image into two distinguishable layers: the clean image
layer and the rain layer. Most of the existing learning-based deraining methods
are supervisedly trained on synthetic rainy-clean pairs. The domain gap between
the synthetic and real rains makes them less generalized to different real
rainy scenes. Moreover, the existing methods mainly utilize the property of the
two layers independently, while few of them have considered the mutually
exclusive relationship between the two layers. In this work, we propose a novel
non-local contrastive learning (NLCL) method for unsupervised image deraining.
Consequently, we not only utilize the intrinsic self-similarity property within
samples but also the mutually exclusive property between the two layers, so as
to better differ the rain layer from the clean image. Specifically, the
non-local self-similarity image layer patches as the positives are pulled
together and similar rain layer patches as the negatives are pushed away. Thus
the similar positive/negative samples that are close in the original space
benefit us to enrich more discriminative representation. Apart from the
self-similarity sampling strategy, we analyze how to choose an appropriate
feature encoder in NLCL. Extensive experiments on different real rainy datasets
demonstrate that the proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance in
real deraining.
