TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions

TL;DR

TransWeather is a transformer-based model that efficiently restores images degraded by various adverse weather conditions using a single encoder-decoder architecture with learnable weather embeddings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel transformer-based approach with intra-patch attention and weather embeddings for all-in-one weather removal, improving over previous CNN-based methods.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on multiple datasets

Effective on real-world degraded images

Uses fewer parameters than prior models

Abstract

Removing adverse weather conditions like rain, fog, and snow from images is an important problem in many applications. Most methods proposed in the literature have been designed to deal with just removing one type of degradation. Recently, a CNN-based method using neural architecture search (All-in-One) was proposed to remove all the weather conditions at once. However, it has a large number of parameters as it uses multiple encoders to cater to each weather removal task and still has scope for improvement in its performance. In this work, we focus on developing an efficient solution for the all adverse weather removal problem. To this end, we propose TransWeather, a transformer-based end-to-end model with just a single encoder and a decoder that can restore an image degraded by any weather condition. Specifically, we utilize a novel transformer encoder using intra-patch transformer blocks to enhance attention inside the patches to effectively remove smaller weather degradations. We also introduce a transformer decoder with learnable weather type embeddings to adjust to the weather degradation at hand. TransWeather achieves improvements across multiple test datasets over both All-in-One network as well as methods fine-tuned for specific tasks. TransWeather is also validated on real world test images and found to be more effective than previous methods. Implementation code can be accessed at https://github.com/jeya-maria-jose/TransWeather .