In this paper, an ill-posed problem of multiple adverse weather removal is investigated. Our goal is to train a model with a ‘unified’ architecture and only one set of pretrained weights that can tackle multiple types of adverse weathers such as haze, snow, and rain simultaneously. To this end, a two-stage knowledge learning mechanism including knowledge collation (KC) and knowledge examination (KE) based on a multi-teacher and student architecture is proposed. At the KC, the student network aims to learn the comprehensive bad weather removal problem from multiple well-trained teacher networks where each of them is specialized in a specific bad weather removal problem. To accomplish this process, a novel collaborative knowledge transfer is proposed. At the KE, the student model is trained without the teacher networks and examined by challenging pixel loss derived by the ground truth. Moreover, to improve the performance of our training framework, a novel loss function called multi-contrastive knowledge regularization (MCR) loss is proposed. Experiments on several datasets show that our student model can achieve promising results on different bad weather removal tasks simultaneously. The code is available in our project page.

Snow is a highly complicated atmospheric phenomenon that usually contains snowflake, snow streak, and veiling effect (similar to the haze or the mist). In this literature, we propose a single image desnowing algorithm to address the diversity of snow particles in shape and size. First, to better represent the complex snow shape, we apply the dual-tree wavelet transform and propose a complex wavelet loss in the network. Second, we propose a hierarchical decomposition paradigm in our network for better under-standing the different sizes of snow particles. Last, we propose a novel feature called the contradict channel (CC) for the snow scenes. We find that the regions containing the snow particles tend to have higher intensity in the CC than that in the snow-free regions. We leverage this discriminative feature to construct the contradict channel loss for improving the performance of snow removal. Moreover, due to the limitation of existing snow datasets, to simulate the snow scenarios comprehensively, we propose a large-scale dataset called Comprehensive Snow Dataset (CSD). Experimental results show that the proposed method can favorably outperform existing methods in three synthetic datasets and real-world datasets. The code and dataset are released in https://github.com/weitingchen83/ICCV2021-Single-Image-Desnowing-HDCWNet.

Single image haze removal is crucial in computer vision. In open literatures, two kinds of dehazing strategies (prior-based and learning-based methods) have been developed. However, they have a trade-off between detail preservation and the image quality. Prior-based methods reconstruct the detail well but have lower image quality while learning-based methods achieve better recovered quality but lose the detail. In this paper, to mitigate this dilemma, a hierarchical architecture using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is proposed. It divides the dehazing problem into two parts: detail and background reconstruction. Based on investigating how haze affects the image in the wavelet domain, two networks for detail and background reconstruction are proposed. To avoid color distortion and the detail loss, the anti-vanish wavelet loss and the bound penalty are proposed. The multi-level wavelet component discriminator is proposed for further improvement. Experiments show that the proposed network can achieve superior performance in all metrics.