Mask-ShadowNet: Toward Shadow Removal via Masked Adaptive Instance Normalization

Shadow removal is an important yet challenging task in image processing and computer vision. Existing methods are limited in extracting good global features due to the interference of shadow. And also, most of them ignore a fact that features inside and outside the shaded area should be treated disparately because of different semantics or materials. In this letter, we propose a novel deep neural network Mask-ShadowNet for shadow removal. The core of our approach is a well-designed masked adaptive instance normalization (MAdaIN) mechanism with embedded aligners that serves two goals: 1) producing hidden features that considering an illumination consistency of different regions. 2) treating the feature statistics of shadow and non-shadow areas discriminately based on the shadow mask. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the ISTD benchmark. Our code is available in https://github.com/penguinbing/Mask-ShadowNet.