Appearance Harmonization for Single Image Shadow Removal

Abstract

Shadow removal is a challenging problem and previous approaches often produce de-shadowed regions that are visually inconsistent with the rest of the image. We propose an automatic shadow region harmonization approach that makes the appearance of a de-shadowed region (produced using any previous technique) compatible with the rest of the image. We use a shadow-guided patch-based image synthesis approach that reconstructs the shadow region using patches sampled from nonshadowed regions. This result is then refined based on the reconstruction confidence to handle unique textures. Qualitative comparisons over a wide range of images, and a quantitative evaluation on a benchmark dataset show that our technique significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art.