Papers › Direction-aware Spatial Context Features for Shadow Detection

Direction-aware Spatial Context Features for Shadow Detection

12 Dec 2017CVPR 2018 6arXiv:1712.04142archive 2025-07-28

Xiaowei Hu, Lei Zhu, Chi-Wing Fu, Jing Qin, Pheng-Ann Heng

Shadow detection is a fundamental and challenging task, since it requires an understanding of global image semantics and there are various backgrounds around shadows. This paper presents a novel network for shadow detection by analyzing image context in a direction-aware manner. To achieve this, we first formulate the direction-aware attention mechanism in a spatial recurrent neural network (RNN) by introducing attention weights when aggregating spatial context features in the RNN. By learning these weights through training, we can recover direction-aware spatial context (DSC) for detecting shadows. This design is developed into the DSC module and embedded in a CNN to learn DSC features at different levels. Moreover, a weighted cross entropy loss is designed to make the training more effective. We employ two common shadow detection benchmark datasets and perform various experiments to evaluate our network. Experimental results show that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves 97% accuracy and 38% reduction on balance error rate.

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stevewongv/dsc-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
xw-hu/DSC pytorch report

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Tasks

Detecting ShadowsShadow Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
RGB Salient Object Detection ISTD DSC Balanced Error Rate 8.24 #5 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
RGB Salient Object Detection SBU / SBU-Refine DSC Balanced Error Rate 5.59 #2 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
RGB Salient Object Detection UCF DSC Balanced Error Rate 8.10 #4 of 7 Archive leaderboard report

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