Image shadow removal using cycle generative adversarial networks

Abstract

A shadow-removal algorithm based on cycle generative adversarial network is proposed. There are two networks in the proposed method. To increase the diversity of shadow images for improving the robustness in the shadow-removal process, the first network is used to add shadows in nonshadow images to increase the variation of training data. Then, the second network is trained for the shadow-removal task. Six different losses are calculated and combined in the loss function to increase the performance. Ablation experiments show that the resulting images suffer from some artifacts without any of the six losses in the loss function. The proposed method presents lower value of root-mean-squared error and the superior visual quality compared to the state-of-the-art image removal algorithms.