# Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12574 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12574/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Closing the Loop: Joint Rain Generation and Removal via Disentangled Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13660/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Deraining: Where Contrastive Learning Meets Self-similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11509/) (2022)
- [FishEye8K: A Benchmark and Dataset for Fisheye Camera Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17449/) (2023)
- [M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16318/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Infrared Image and Video Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08581/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Deraining: Where Asymmetric Contrastive Learning Meets Self-similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00837/) (2022)
- [Mixture Domain Adaptation to Improve Semantic Segmentation in Real-World Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10119/) (2022)
- [Task-Driven Deep Image Enhancement Network for Autonomous Driving in Bad Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07206/) (2021)
- [IF-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Infrared Images with Generative Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09663/) (2025)
- [DeLiVR: Differential Spatiotemporal Lie Bias for Efficient Video Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21719/) (2025)
- [UNIP: Rethinking Pre-trained Attention Patterns for Infrared Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02257/) (2025)
- [Edge-case Synthesis for Fisheye Object Detection: A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16254/) (2025)
- [Take Your Pick: Enabling Effective Personalized Federated Learning within Low-dimensional Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13995/) (2023)
- [TSBOW -- Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded Vehicles Under Various Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05414/) (2026)
- [Towards Improving Robustness Against Common Corruptions in Object Detectors Using Adversarial Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07928/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy by 7.72%.