Detection of and compensation for shadows in colored urban aerial images

A new method for shadow detection in colored urban aerial images is proposed. First, a new imaging model of shadows is presented, which indicates that hue values of shadowed image areas are larger than those of these areas non-shadowed. Based on this model, a thresholding technique is employed to detect shadowed areas. After detection, the Retinex technique is applied to shadowed and non-shadowed areas individually to compensate for shadows. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

[1]  E H Land,et al.  An alternative technique for the computation of the designator in the retinex theory of color vision. , 1986, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[2]  Touradj Ebrahimi,et al.  Shadow identification and classification using invariant color models , 2001, 2001 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings (Cat. No.01CH37221).

[3]  C. Jiang,et al.  Shadow identification , 1992, Proceedings 1992 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[4]  Arnold W. M. Smeulders,et al.  Color-based object recognition , 1997, Pattern Recognit..

[5]  Bui Tuong Phong Illumination for computer generated pictures , 1975, Commun. ACM.