Shadow removal algorithm with shadow area border processing

This article is devoted to shadow detection and removal algorithm for very high resolution satellite images. The shadows were identified by shadow detection index calculation and thresholding. In this work the Otsu method is applied to determine the optimal threshold of binarization. After obtaining a shadow binary mask, we restore illumination in the shadow areas by using a shadow formation model. As a result, we obtained a shadow-free satellite image. The distortions that appear at the shadow borders significantly reduce the quality of the obtained image. We proposed a method of solving such an important problem as shadow area border processing.