UnShadowNet: Illumination Critic Guided Contrastive Learning For Shadow Removal

Abstract

Shadows are frequently encountered natural phenomena that significantly hinder the performance of computer vision perception systems in practical settings, e.g., autonomous driving. A solution to this would be to eliminate shadow regions from the images before the processing of the perception system. Yet, training such a solution requires pairs of aligned shadowed and non-shadowed images which are difficult to obtain. We introduce a novel weakly supervised shadow removal framework UnShadowNet trained using contrastive learning. It comprises of a DeShadower network responsible for removal of the extracted shadow under the guidance of an Illumination network which is trained adversarially by the illumination critic and a Refinement network to further remove artifacts. We show that UnShadowNet can also be easily extended to a fully-supervised setup to exploit the ground-truth when available. UnShadowNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on three publicly available shadow datasets (ISTD, adjusted ISTD, SRD) in both the weakly and fully supervised setups.