Human Shadow Removal with Unknown Light Source

In this paper, we present a shadow removal technique which effectively eliminates a human shadow cast from an unknown direction of light source. A multi-cue shadow descriptor is proposed to characterize the distinctive properties of shadows. We employ a 3-stage process to detect then remove shadows. Our algorithm improves the shadow detection accuracy by imposing the spatial constraint between the foreground subregions of human and shadow. We collect a dataset containing 81 human-shadow images for evaluation. Both descriptor ROC curves and qualitative results demonstrate the superior performance of our method.