Image degradation caused by shadows is likely to cause technological issues in image segmentation and target recognition. In view of the existing shadow removal methods, there are problems such as small and trivial shadow processing, the scarcity of end-to-end automatic methods, the neglecting of light, and high-level semantic information such as materials. An end-to-end deep convolutional neural network is proposed to further improve the image shadow removal effect. The network mainly consists of two network models, an encoder–decoder network and a small refinement network. The former predicts the alpha shadow scale factor, and the latter refines to obtain sharper edge information. In addition, a new image database (remove shadow database, RSDB) is constructed; and qualitative and quantitative evaluations are made on databases such as UIUC, UCF and newly-created databases (RSDB) with various real images. Using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity (SSIM) for quantitative analysis, the algorithm has a big improvement on the PSNR and the SSIM as opposed to other methods. In terms of qualitative comparisons, the network shadow has a clearer and shadow-free image that is consistent with the original image color and texture, and the detail processing effect is much better. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to other algorithms, and it is more robust in subjective vision and objective quantization.

By recognizing sensory information, through touch, vision, or voice sensory modalities, a robot can interact with people in a more intelligent manner. In human-robot interaction (HRI), emotion recognition has been a popular research topic in recent years. This paper proposes a method for emotion recognition, using a speech signal to recognize several basic human emotional states, for application in an entertainment robot. The proposed method uses voice signal processing and classification. Firstly, end-point detection and frame setting are accomplished in the pre-processing stage. Then, the statistical features of the energy contour are computed. Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) is used to enhance the recognition rate. In the final stage, a support vector machine (SVM) is used to complete the emotional state classification. In order to determine the effectiveness of emotional HRI, an embedded system was constructed and integrated with a self-built entertainment robot. The experimental results for the entertainment robot show that the robot interacts with a person in a responsive manner. The average recognition rate for five emotional states is 73.8% using the database constructed in the authors' lab.

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Detecting and removing raindrops from an image while keeping the high quality of image details has attracted tremendous studies, but remains a challenging task due to the inhomogeneity of the degraded region and the complexity of the degraded intensity. In this paper, we get rid of the dependence of deep learning on image-to-image translation and propose a separationrestoration-fusion network for raindrops removal. Our key idea is to recover regions of different damage levels individually, so that each region achieves the optimal recovery result, and finally fuse the recovered areas. In the region restoration module, to complete the restoration of a specific area, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion global information aggregation attention network to achieve global to local information aggregation. Besides, we also design an inside and outside dense connection dilated network, to ensure the fusion of the separated regions and the fine restoration of the image. The qualitatively and quantitatively evaluations are conducted to evaluate our method with the latest existing methods. The result demonstrates that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the benchmark datasets in extensive experiments. CCS Concepts • Computing methodologies → Image processing;