Deep Unfolding Network for Image Desnowing With Snow Shape Prior
Xin Guo, Xi Wang, Xueyang Fu, Zheng-Jun Zha · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2025
Effectively leveraging snow image formulation, which accounts for atmospheric light and snow masks, is crucial for enhancing image desnowing performance and improving interpretability. However, current direct-learning approaches often neglect this formulation, while model-based methods use it in overly simplistic ways. To address this, we propose a novel unfolding network that iteratively refines the desnowing process for more thorough optimization. Additionally, model-based techniques usually rely on real-world snow masks for supervision, a requirement that is impractical in many real-world applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a snow shape prior as a surrogate supervision signal. We further integrate the physical properties of atmospheric light and heavy snow by decomposing the optimization task into manageable sub-problems within our unfolding network. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets confirm that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques.