Shadow Removal from a Single Image

Abstract

Shadow detection and removal in real scene images is always a challenging but yet intriguing problem. In contrast with the rapidly expanding and continuous interests on this area, it is always hard to provide a robust system to eliminate shadows in static images. This paper aimed to give a comprehensive method to remove both vague and hard shadows from a single image. First, classification is applied to the derivatives of the input image to separate the vague shadows. Then, color invariant is exploited to distinguish the hard shadow edges from the material edges. Next, we derive the illumination image via solving the standard Poisson equation. Finally, we got the shadow-free reflectance image. Experimental results showed that our method can robustly remove both vague and hard shadows appearing in the real scene images