Convolutional sparse coding and directional gradient prior based method for single image rain streak removal

In this paper, we address the rain streak removal from a single image. In order to efficiently detect and remove the annoying rain streaks, we propose a global single-directional gradient prior with the L0 norm to model the rain streak. To preserve the abundant information of the background, we learn a convolutional sparse coding (CSC) to represent the background. Furthermore, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve multi-variable optimization problems. Experiments on synthesized and real-world images show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-art methods in terms of rain streak removal and background preservation.