Recasting Regional Lighting for Shadow Removal

Removing shadows requires an understanding of both lighting conditions and object textures in a scene. Existing methods typically learn pixel-level color mappings between shadow and non-shadow images, in which the joint modeling of lighting and object textures is implicit and inadequate. We observe that in a shadow region, the degradation degree of object textures depends on the local illumination, while simply enhancing the local illumination cannot fully recover the attenuated textures. Based on this observation, we propose to condition the restoration of attenuated textures on the corrected local lighting in the shadow region. Specifically, We first design a shadow-aware decomposition network to estimate the illumination and reflectance layers of shadow regions explicitly. We then propose a novel bilateral correction network to recast the lighting of shadow regions in the illumination layer via a novel local lighting correction module, and to restore the textures conditioned on the corrected illumination layer via a novel illumination-guided texture restoration module. We further annotate pixel-wise shadow masks for the SRD dataset, which originally contains only image pairs. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing SOTA shadow removal methods.