Breaking the rain barrier: A novel approach in image processing with AMGR‐Net

Abstract Image quality is significantly impacted by rain, posing challenges in fields like surveillance, autonomous driving, and outdoor robotics. The field of image deraining, particularly for single image, has attracted considerable attention to improve image clarity in inclement weather. To overcome the inherent complexity of the single‐image rain removal task, we proposed a novel architecture of the attention mechanism and gated recurrent network (AMGR‐Net) that combines spatial and channel attention mechanisms with gated recurrent units. AMGR‐Net contains multiple modules, each of which uses convolution kernels and attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction. AMGR‐Net demonstrates superior performance over state‐of‐the‐art methods in both synthetic and real‐world image datasets, as evidenced by higher peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity index measurement scores. The integration of spatial attention significantly enhances feature expression, enabling more effective rain streak removal and detail preservation. Furthermore, this method also shows promising results in the application of stripe noise removal from meteorological satellite cloud images.