# Magic ELF: Image Deraining Meets Association Learning and Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10455/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09681/) (2021)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10985/) (2020)
- [Density-aware Single Image De-raining using a Multi-stream Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07412/) (2018)
- [Recurrent Squeeze-and-Excitation Context Aggregation Net for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05698/) (2018)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [Clearing the Skies: A deep network architecture for single-image rain removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02087/) (2016)
- [A Model-driven Deep Neural Network for Single Image Rain Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01333/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty Guided Multi-Scale Residual Learning-using a Cycle Spinning CNN for Single Image De-Raining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11129/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11950/) (2023)
- [Sparse Sampling Transformer with Uncertainty-Driven Ranking for Unified Removal of Raindrops and Rain Streaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14153/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Deep Image Deraining: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03535/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11014/) (2022)
- [SIRST-5K: Exploring Massive Negatives Synthesis with Self-supervised Learning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05416/) (2024)
- [Learning A Spiking Neural Network for Efficient Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06277/) (2024)
- [NiteDR: Nighttime Image De-Raining with Cross-View Sensor Cooperative Learning for Dynamic Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18172/) (2024)
- [A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00410/) (2024)
- [TANet: Triplet Attention Network for All-In-One Adverse Weather Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08177/) (2024)
- [Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18644/) (2026)
- [Joint multi-dimensional dynamic attention and transformer for general image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07893/) (2024)
- [Learning Dual-Domain Multi-Scale Representations for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12014/) (2025)
- [Derain-Agent: A Plug-and-Play Agent Framework for Rainy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11866/) (2026)
- [Exploiting Regional Information Transformer for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16033/) (2024)
- [MDeRainNet: An Efficient Macro-pixel Image Rain Removal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10652/) (2024)
- [DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16298/) (2026)
- [TTTIR: Unlocking Instance-Specific State Evolution via Test-Time Training for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer have achieved great success in multimedia applications. However, little effort has been made to effectively and efficiently harmonize these two architectures to satisfy image deraining. This paper aims to unify these two architectures to take advantage of their learning merits for image deraining. In particular, the local connectivity and translation equivariance of CNN and the global aggregation ability of self-attention (SA) in Transformer are fully exploited for specific local context and global structure representations. Based on the observation that rain distribution reveals the degradation location and degree, we introduce degradation prior to help background recovery and accordingly present the association refinement deraining scheme. A novel multi-input attention module (MAM) is proposed to associate rain perturbation removal and background recovery. Moreover, we equip our model with effective depth-wise separable convolutions to learn the specific feature representations and trade off computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method (dubbed as ELF) outperforms the state-of-the-art approach (MPRNet) by 0.25 dB on average, but only accounts for 11.7% and 42.1% of its computational cost and parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/kuijiang94/Magic-ELF.