The invention provides an image rain removal method based on an attention mechanism and a gating circulation unit, and the method comprises the steps: firstly constructing an image rain removal network architecture based on the attention mechanism and the gating circulation unit, wherein the image rain removal network architecture includes 6 modules, each of the first five modules comprises a gating circulation unit, a spatial attention module and an activation function; wherein the module 1 is used as an encoder, expansion convolution with expansion factors of 1, 2, 4 and 8 is respectively used in the module 2 to the module 5, and the sizes of corresponding receiving domains are respectively 5 * 5, 9 * 9, 17 * 17 and 33 * 33; the module 6 comprises a convolution layer, a channel attentionmodule and an activation function, and a 1 * 1 convolution layer is connected behind the module 6 and serves as a decoder to generate residual error mapping; then, selecting the MSE and the SSIM as loss functions; and finally, training the constructed network architecture. According to the method, the problems of rain stripe residues and detail blurring occurring in processing of the image containing the dense rain stripes are solved, the rain lines in the image are removed, meanwhile, the detail parts of the image are reserved, and the image definition is greatly improved.