SpikeRain: Towards Energy-Efficient Single Image Deraining with Spiking Neural Networks

With the rapid deployment of vision systems on edge devices, energy-efficient and temporally aware image deraining models are increasingly needed. We propose SpikeRain, a spiking neural network (SNN) that achieves competitive deraining performance with substantially lower computational cost than conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike ANN-based approaches with dense activations and high memory demands, SpikeRain leverages the event-driven sparse-firing nature of spiking neurons for efficient temporal integration and contextual learning. Built on an encoder-decoder framework, SpikeRain incorporates three spiking native modules: a Dense Spiking Residual Block (DSRB) for temporal integration and feature reuse, a Multi-Dimensional Spiking Attention (MDSA) module to model temporal channel spatial dependencies, and an Adaptive Residual Feature Enhancement (ARFE) block with gated attention to refine salient features. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that SpikeRain achieves state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM while reducing parameters by approximately 40% and FLOPs by approximately 89%, with energy efficiency on par with existing SNN methods. These results highlight the potential of SNNs for real-time low-power image restoration on neuromorphic platforms. SpikeRain code is available on GitHub.