Estimating Cast Shadows using SFS and Class-based Surface Completion

This paper describes a method for cast shadow removal from obliquely illuminated images of faces. The method draws on a statistical model of surface normal directions. The model is fitted to shadowed facial images using robust statistics and constraints provided by shape-from-shading. Regions associated with poor fit residuals are associated with shadow regions. We illustrate the method on the Yale B database where it gives both good shadow map estimates and fills-in the facial surface in the shadow regions