Shadow removal from textured images

Abstract

Shadows and shadings are typical natural phenomena, which can often be found in images and videos acquired under strong directional lighting, such as those taken outdoors on a sunny day. Unfortunately, shadows can cause many difficulties in image processing and vision-related tasks, such like image segmentation and object recognition. Therefore, shadow removal is needed for improving the performance of these image understanding tasks. We present a new shadow removal algorithm for real textured color images. The algorithm is based on the statistical property of textures in images. The experimental results on real-world data are shown to demonstrate this algorithm.