Effective shadow removal via multi-scale image decomposition

Shadow removal is a fundamental and challenging problem in image processing field. Current approaches can only process shadows with simple scenes. For complex texture and illumination, the performance is less impressive. In this paper, we propose a novel shadow removal algorithm based on multi-scale image decomposition, which can recover the illumination for complex shadows with inconsistent illumination and different surface materials. Independent of shadow detection, our algorithm only requires a rough boundary distinguishing shadow regions from non-shadow regions. It first performs a multi-scale decomposition for the input image based on an illumination-sensitive smoothing process and then removes shadows in the basic layer using a local-to-global optimization strategy, which fuses all local shadow-free results in a global manner. Finally, we recover the texture details for the shadow-free basic layer and obtain the final shadow-free image. We validate the performance of the proposed method under various lighting and texture conditions and show consistent illumination between shadow and surrounding regions in the shadow removal results.