# Towards Unified Deep Image Deraining: A Survey and A New Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 79 of its 151 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01164/) (2019)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (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)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Bidirectional Multi-Scale Implicit Neural Representations for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01547/) (2024)
- [FoundIR: Unleashing Million-scale Training Data to Advance Foundation Models for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01427/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12711/) (2025)
- [WeatherBench: A Real-World Benchmark Dataset for All-in-One Adverse Weather Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11642/) (2025)
- [DeRainGS: Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced Scene Reconstruction in Rainy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11540/) (2024)
- [Learning A Spiking Neural Network for Efficient Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06277/) (2024)
- [UAV-Rain1k: A Benchmark for Raindrop Removal from UAV Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05773/) (2024)
- [Residual Diffusion Bridge Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23116/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19684/) (2024)
- [FoundIR-v2: Optimizing Pre-Training Data Mixtures for Image Restoration Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09282/) (2025)
- [Diff-Mosaic: Augmenting Realistic Representations in Infrared Small Target Detection via Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00632/) (2024)
- [DSwinIR: Rethinking Window-based Attention for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04869/) (2025)
- [A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00410/) (2024)
- [Beyond Degradation Redundancy: Contrastive Prompt Learning for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09973/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Nighttime Image Deraining via Learnable Color Space Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17440/) (2025)
- [LSD3K: A Benchmark for Smoke Removal from Laparoscopic Surgery Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13132/) (2024)
- [SmokeBench: A Real-World Dataset for Surveillance Image Desmoking in Early-Stage Fire Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12701/) (2025)
- [FlareX: A Physics-Informed Dataset for Lens Flare Removal via 2D Synthesis and 3D Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09995/) (2025)
- [BurstDeflicker: A Benchmark Dataset for Flicker Removal in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09996/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Rainy 3D Scene Reconstruction via Perspective Transforming and Brightness Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06734/) (2025)
- [V-Bridge: Bridging Video Generative Priors to Versatile Few-shot Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13089/) (2026)
- [UniRain: Unified Image Deraining with RAG-based Dataset Distillation and Multi-objective Reweighted Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03967/) (2026)
- [CLIP-driven rain perception: Adaptive deraining with pattern-aware network routing and mask-guided cross-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01366/) (2025)
- [PRISM: Progressive Rain removal with Integrated State-space Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26413/) (2025)
- [SD-PSFNet: Sequential and Dynamic Point Spread Function Network for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17993/) (2025)
- [Derain-Agent: A Plug-and-Play Agent Framework for Rainy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11866/) (2026)
- [UENR-600K: A Large-Scale Physically Grounded Dataset for Nighttime Video Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04402/) (2026)
- [Exploiting Regional Information Transformer for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16033/) (2024)
- [Towards Ultra-High-Definition Image Deraining: A Benchmark and An Efficient Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17074/) (2024)
- [Single Image Rain Streak Removal Using Harris Corner Loss and R-CBAM Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23185/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in image deraining due to the kinds of effective image priors and deep learning models. As each deraining approach has individual settings (e.g., training and test datasets, evaluation criteria), how to fairly evaluate existing approaches comprehensively is not a trivial task. Although existing surveys aim to review of image deraining approaches comprehensively, few of them focus on providing unify evaluation settings to examine the deraining capability and practicality evaluation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing image deraining method and provide a unify evaluation setting to evaluate the performance of image deraining methods. We construct a new high-quality benchmark named HQ-RAIN to further conduct extensive evaluation, consisting of 5,000 paired high-resolution synthetic images with higher harmony and realism. We also discuss the existing challenges and highlight several future research opportunities worth exploring. To facilitate the reproduction and tracking of the latest deraining technologies for general users, we build an online platform to provide the off-the-shelf toolkit, involving the large-scale performance evaluation. This online platform and the proposed new benchmark are publicly available and will be regularly updated at http://www.deraining.tech/.