Flash shadow detection and removal in stereo photography

Shadows created by flash when taking stereo images adversely affect 3D perception when stereo images are merged into 3D images. This paper presents a shadow detection and removal algorithm for stereo images taken under flash lighting. This is the first attempt at addressing the flash shadow problem in stereo photography. A quantitative measure is introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of shadow detection and a subjective rating is done to evaluate the effectiveness of shadow relighting or removal for 3D perception. It is shown that the developed solution outperforms the previous solutions designed for single images.