Shadow Removal With Paired and Unpaired Learning

Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Andres Romero, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2021, pp. 826-835

Shadow removal is an important computer vision task aiming at the detection and successful removal of the shadow produced by an occluded light source and a photo-realistic restoration of the image contents. Decades of research produced a multitude of hand-crafted restoration techniques and, more recently, learned solutions from shadowed and shadow-free training image pairs. In this work, we propose a single image shadow removal solution via self-supervised learning by using a conditioned mask. We rely on self-supervision and jointly learn deep models to remove and add shadows to images. We derive two variants for learning from paired images and unpaired images, respectively. Our validation on the recently introduced ISTD and USR datasets demonstrate large quantitative and qualitative improvements over the state-of-the-art for both paired and unpaired learning settings.