Adaptive Illumination Mapping for Shadow Detection in Raw Images

Shadow detection methods rely on multi-scale contrast, especially global contrast, information to locate shadows correctly. However, we observe that the camera image signal processor (ISP) tends to preserve more local contrast information by sacrificing global contrast information during the raw-to-sRGB conversion process. This often causes existing methods to fail in scenes with high global contrast but low local contrast in shadow regions. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect shadows from raw images. Our key idea is that instead of performing a many-to-one mapping like the ISP process, we can learn a many-to-many mapping from the high dynamic range raw images to the sRGB images of different illumination, which is able to preserve multi-scale contrast for accurate shadow detection. To this end, we first construct a new shadow dataset with ~ 7000 raw images and shadow masks. We then propose a novel network, which includes a novel adaptive illumination mapping (AIM) module to project the input raw images into sRGB images of different intensity ranges and a shadow detection module to leverage the preserved multi-scale contrast information to detect shadows. To learn the shadow-aware adaptive illumination mapping process, we propose a novel feedback mechanism to guide the AIM during training. Experiments show that our method outperforms state- of-the-art shadow detectors. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jiayusun/SARA. © 2023 IEEE.