Auto-Exposure Fusion for Single-Image Shadow Removal
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Lan Fu, Changqing Zhou, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Hongkai Yu, Wei Feng, Yang Liu, Song Wang
Shadow removal is still a challenging task due to its inherent background-dependent and spatial-variant properties, leading to unknown and diverse shadow patterns. Even powerful state-of-the-art deep neural networks could hardly recover traceless shadow-removed background. This paper proposes a new solution for this task by formulating it as an exposure fusion problem to address the challenges. Intuitively, we can first estimate multiple over-exposure images w.r.t. the input image to let the shadow regions in these images have the same color with shadow-free areas in the input image. Then, we fuse the original input with the over-exposure images to generate the final shadow-free counterpart. Nevertheless, the spatial-variant property of the shadow requires the fusion to be sufficiently `smart', that is, it should automatically select proper over-exposure pixels from different images to make the final output natural. To address this challenge, we propose the shadow-aware FusionNet that takes the shadow image as input to generate fusion weight maps across all the over-exposure images. Moreover, we propose the boundary-aware RefineNet to eliminate the remaining shadow trace further. We conduct extensive experiments on the ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD datasets to validate our method's effectiveness and show better performance in shadow regions and comparable performance in non-shadow regions over the state-of-the-art methods. We release the model and code in https://github.com/tsingqguo/exposure-fusion-shadow-removal.
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；China Agriculture University（中国农业大学）
Shadow removal is a computer-vision task that aims to restore the image content in shadow regions. While almost all recent shadow-removal methods require shadow-free images for training, in ECCV 2020 Le and Samaras introduces an innovative approach without this requirement by cropping patches with and without shadows from shadow images as training samples. However, it is still laborious and time-consuming to construct a large amount of such unpaired patches. In this paper, we propose a new G2R-ShadowNet which leverages shadow generation for weakly-supervised shadow removal by only using a set …
The requirement for paired shadow and shadow-free images limits the size and diversity of shadow removal datasets and hinders the possibility of training large-scale, robust shadow removal algorithms. We propose a shadow removal method that can be trained using only shadow and non-shadow patches cropped from the shadow images themselves. Our method is trained via an adversarial framework, following a physical model of shadow formation. Our central contribution is a set of physics-based constraints that enables this adversarial training. Our method achieves competitive shadow removal results co…
We propose a novel deep learning method for shadow removal. Inspired by physical models of shadow formation, we use a linear illumination transformation to model the shadow effects in the image that allows the shadow image to be expressed as a combination of the shadow-free image, the shadow parameters, and a matte layer. We use two deep networks, namely SP-Net and M-Net, to predict the shadow parameters and the shadow matte respectively. This system allows us to remove the shadow effects from images. We then employ an inpainting network, I-Net, to further refine the results. We train and test…
Portrait images often suffer from undesirable shadows cast by casual objects or even the face itself. While existing methods for portrait shadow removal require training on a large-scale synthetic dataset, we propose the first unsupervised method for portrait shadow removal without any training data. Our key idea is to leverage the generative facial priors embedded in the off-the-shelf pretrained StyleGAN2. To achieve this, we formulate the shadow removal task as a layer decomposition problem: a shadowed portrait image is constructed by the blending of a shadow image and a shadow-free image. W…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；China Mobile Research Institute（中国移动研究院）
Aiming to restore the original intensity of shadow regions in an image and make them compatible with the remaining non-shadow regions without a trace, shadow removal is a very challenging problem that benefits many downstream image/video-related tasks. Recently, transformers have shown their strong capability in various applications by capturing global pixel interactions and this capability is highly desirable in shadow removal. However, applying transformers to promote shadow removal is non-trivial for the following two reasons: 1) The patchify operation is not suitable for shadow removal due…
University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
A user-centric method for fast, interactive, robust and high-quality shadow removal is presented. Our algorithm can perform detection and removal in a range of difficult cases: such as highly textured and colored shadows. To perform detection an on-the-fly learning approach is adopted guided by two rough user inputs for the pixels of the shadow and the lit area. After detection, shadow removal is performed by registering the penumbra to a normalized frame which allows us efficient estimation of non-uniform shadow illumination changes, resulting in accurate and robust removal. Another major con…
Shadow removal is an essential task in computer vision and computer graphics. Recent shadow removal approaches all train convolutional neural networks (CNN) on real paired shadow/shadow-free or shadow/shadow-free/mask image datasets. However, obtaining a large-scale, diverse, and accurate dataset has been a big challenge, and it limits the performance of the learned models on shadow images with unseen shapes/intensities. To overcome this challenge, we present SynShadow, a novel large-scale synthetic shadow/shadow-free/matte image triplets dataset and a pipeline to synthesize it. We extend a ph…
Current shadow detection methods perform poorly when detecting shadow regions that are small, unclear or have blurry edges. In this work, we attempt to address this problem on two fronts. First, we propose a Fine Context-aware Shadow Detection Network (FCSD-Net), where we constraint the receptive field size and focus on low-level features to learn fine context features better. Second, we propose a new learning strategy, called Restore to Detect (R2D), where we show that when a deep neural network is trained for restoration (shadow removal), it learns meaningful features to delineate the shadow…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Adobe Systems Inc.（奥多比系统公司）
Shadows often create unwanted artifacts in photographs, and removing them can be very challenging. Previous shadow removal methods often produce de-shadowed regions that are visually inconsistent with the rest of the image. In this work we propose a fully automatic shadow region harmonization approach that improves the appearance compatibility of the de-shadowed region as typically produced by previous methods. It is based on a shadow-guided patch-based image synthesis approach that reconstructs the shadow region using patches sampled from non-shadowed regions. The result is then refined based…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Shadow removal can significantly improve the image visual quality and has many applications in computer vision. Deep learning methods based on CNNs have become the most effective approach for shadow removal by training on either paired data, where both the shadow and underlying shadow-free versions of an image are known, or unpaired data, where shadow and shadow-free training images are totally different with no correspondence. In practice, CNN training on unpaired data is more preferred given the easiness of training data collection. In this paper, we present a new Lightness-Guided Shadow Rem…
Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, most of the existing approaches focus on working locally within shadow and non-shadow regions, resulting in severe artifacts around the shadow boundaries as well as inconsistent illumination between shadow and non-shadow regions. It is still challenging for the deep shadow removal model to exploit the global contextual correlation between shadow and non-shadow regions. In this work, we first propose a Retinex-based shadow model, from which we derive a novel transformer-based network, dubbed ShandowFo…
Beyond Shadows: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Multi-Stage Framework for High-Fidelity Facial Shadow Removal
New York Institute of Technology（纽约理工学院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学）；Huizhou University（惠州大学）
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Facial landmark detection is a very fundamental and significant vision task with many important applications. In practice, facial landmark detection can be affected by a lot of natural degradations. One of the most common and important degradations is the shadow caused by light source blocking. While many advanced shadow removal methods have been proposed to recover the image quality in recent years, their effects to facial landmark detection are not well studied. For example, it remains unclear whether shadow removal could enhance the robustness of facial landmark detection to diverse shadow …
We propose a novel deep learning method for shadow removal. Inspired by physical models of shadow formation, we use a linear illumination transformation to model the shadow effects in the image that allows the shadow image to be expressed as a combination of the shadow-free image, the shadow parameters, and a matte layer. We use two deep networks, namely SP-Net and M-Net, to predict the shadow parameters and the shadow matte respectively. This system allows us to remove the shadow effects on the images. We train and test our framework on the most challenging shadow removal dataset (ISTD). Comp…
ShadowMamba: State-Space Model with Boundary-Region Selective Scan for Shadow Removal
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Malaya（马来大学电气工程系）；Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Southern University College（南方学院工程与信息技术学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
The key to shadow removal is recovering the contents of the shadow regions with the guidance of the non-shadow regions. Due to the inadequate long-range modeling, the CNN-based approaches cannot thoroughly investigate the information from the non-shadow regions. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cleanness-navigated-shadow network (CNSNet), with a shadow-oriented adaptive normalization (SOAN) module and a shadow-aware aggregation with transformer (SAAT) module based on the shadow mask. Under the guidance of the shadow mask, the SOAN module formulates the statistics from the non-shadow r…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC)（高性能计算研究所）；Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR)（前沿人工智能研究中心）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）；InnoPeak Technology Inc.（InnoPeak科技公司）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）
FASR-Net: Unsupervised Shadow Removal Leveraging Inherent Frequency Priors
Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学信息工程与自动化学院）；College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学机电与控制工程学院）
Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, their restored images still suffer from unsatisfactory boundary artifacts, due to the lack of degradation prior embedding and the deficiency in modeling capacity. Our work addresses these issues by proposing a unified diffusion framework that integrates both the image and degradation priors for highly effective shadow removal. In detail, we first propose a shadow degradation model, which inspires us to build a novel unrolling diffusion model, dubbed ShandowDiffusion. It remarkably improves the model'…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage context-aware network named CANet for shadow removal, in which the contextual information from non-shadow regions is transferred to shadow regions at the embedded feature spaces. At Stage-I, we propose a contextual patch matching (CPM) module to generate a set of potential matching pairs of shadow and non-shadow patches. Combined with the potential contextual relationships between shadow and non-shadow regions, our well-designed contextual feature transfer (CFT) mechanism can transfer contextual information from non-shadow to shadow regions at differ…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Shadow detection and shadow removal are fundamental and challenging tasks, requiring an understanding of the global image semantics. This paper presents a novel deep neural network design for shadow detection and removal by analyzing the spatial image context in a direction-aware manner. To achieve this, we first formulate the direction-aware attention mechanism in a spatial recurrent neural network (RNN) by introducing attention weights when aggregating spatial context features in the RNN. By learning these weights through training, we can recover direction-aware spatial context (DSC) for det…
Shadows are common aspect of images and when left undetected can hinder scene understanding and visual processing. We propose a simple yet effective approach based on reflectance to detect shadows from single image. An image is first segmented and based on the reflectance, illumination and texture characteristics, segments pairs are identified as shadow and non-shadow pairs. The proposed method is tested on two publicly available and widely used datasets. Our method achieves higher accuracy in detecting shadows compared to previous reported methods despite requiring fewer parameters. We also s…
Structure-Guided Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Portrait Shadow Removal
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, China（教育部人工智能与先进计算重点实验室）
University of Macau（澳门大学）；Xi’an University of Technology（西安理工大学）
Shadow removal is an essential task for scene understanding. Many studies consider only matching the image contents, which often causes two types of ghosts: color in-consistencies in shadow regions or artifacts on shadow boundaries. In this paper, we tackle these issues in two ways. First, to carefully learn the border artifacts-free image, we propose a novel network structure named the dual hierarchically aggregation network~(DHAN). It contains a series of growth dilated convolutions as the backbone without any down-samplings, and we hierarchically aggregate multi-context features for attenti…
DocDeshadower: Frequency-Aware Transformer for Document Shadow Removal
Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau（澳门大学科技学院）；Tp-Link International Shenzhen Co.,Ltd.（普联国际（深圳）有限公司）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Huizhou University（惠州学院计算机科学与工程学院）
FreeShadow: Training-Free Shadow Removal via Illumination Transfer and Selective Content Preservation in Diffusion Models
School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；Polytech Nantes, Université de Nantes（南特大学南特理工学院）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Understanding shadows from a single image spontaneously derives into two types of task in previous studies, containing shadow detection and shadow removal. In this paper, we present a multi-task perspective, which is not embraced by any existing work, to jointly learn both detection and removal in an end-to-end fashion that aims at enjoying the mutually improved benefits from each other. Our framework is based on a novel STacked Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (ST-CGAN), which is composed of two stacked CGANs, each with a generator and a discriminator. Specifically, a shadow image i…
CERTH, Information Technologies Institute（CERTH信息技术研究所）；Samsung Research UK（三星英国研究院）
Document shadow removal is an integral task in document enhancement pipelines, as it improves visibility, readability and thus the overall quality. Assuming that the majority of practical document shadow removal scenarios require real-time, accurate models that can produce high-resolution outputs in-the-wild, we propose Laplacian Pyramid with Input/Output Attention Network (LP-IOANet), a novel pipeline with a lightweight architecture and an upsampling module. Furthermore, we propose three new datasets which cover a wide range of lighting conditions, images, shadow shapes and viewpoints. Our re…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Kitware Inc.（Kitware公司）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）
In this paper we propose an attentive recurrent generative adversarial network (ARGAN) to detect and remove shadows in an image. The generator consists of multiple progressive steps. At each step a shadow attention detector is firstly exploited to generate an attention map which specifies shadow regions in the input image.Given the attention map, a negative residual by a shadow remover encoder will recover a shadow-lighter or even a shadow-free image. A discriminator is designed to classify whether the output image in the last progressive step is real or fake. Moreover, ARGAN is suitable to be…
In portraits, eyeglasses may occlude facial regions and generate cast shadows on faces, which degrades the performance of many techniques like face verification and expression recognition. Portrait eyeglasses removal is critical in handling these problems. However, completely removing the eyeglasses is challenging because the lighting effects (e.g., cast shadows) caused by them are often complex. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to remove eyeglasses as well as their cast shadows from face images. The method works in a detect-then-remove manner, in which eyeglasses and cast shadows a…
