Improving the performance of automotive vision‐based applications under rainy conditions

Input images are the main source of information for vision‐based algorithms. The presence of raindrops in input images degrades their quality and, consequently, reduces the quality of the target vision‐based algorithm that consumes them. Many image restoration algorithms were proposed in the literature to remove rain presence in images to improve the input image quality. These algorithms, however, cannot remove all the raindrop presence and sometimes introduce undesirable side‐effects, such as the blurring rain‐occluded sections of the image and incorrectly de‐raining areas in the image that are clear. It is hypothesized that a comparable performance improvement can be achieved by decreasing the sensitivity of vision‐based algorithms to noisy input images, rather than denoising these images, through the process of de‐raining. To test this hypothesis, the performance of state‐of‐the‐art object detection and semantic segmentation models was evaluated, with de‐rained image datasets used as input, and compared it to that performance of the same models, retrained with rained image sets. Results showed that the performance of the retrained models was better than that of the baseline detector with de‐rained images used as input.