Papers › Revisiting Shadow Detection: A New Benchmark Dataset for Complex World

Revisiting Shadow Detection: A New Benchmark Dataset for Complex World

16 Nov 2019arXiv:1911.06998archive 2025-07-28

Xiaowei Hu, Tianyu Wang, Chi-Wing Fu, Yitong Jiang, Qiong Wang, Pheng-Ann Heng

Shadow detection in general photos is a nontrivial problem, due to the complexity of the real world. Though recent shadow detectors have already achieved remarkable performance on various benchmark data, their performance is still limited for general real-world situations. In this work, we collected shadow images for multiple scenarios and compiled a new dataset of 10,500 shadow images, each with labeled ground-truth mask, for supporting shadow detection in the complex world. Our dataset covers a rich variety of scene categories, with diverse shadow sizes, locations, contrasts, and types. Further, we comprehensively analyze the complexity of the dataset, present a fast shadow detection network with a detail enhancement module to harvest shadow details, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method to detect shadows in general situations.

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xw-hu/FSDNet officialpytorch report

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Shadow Detection

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

CUHK-Shadow

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Shadow Detection CUHK-Shadow FSDNet (TIP 2021) (512x512) BER 8.84 #10 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Shadow Detection CUHK-Shadow FSDNet (TIP 2021) (256x256) BER 9.93 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Shadow Detection SBU / SBU-Refine FSDNet (TIP 2021) (512x512) BER 6.8 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Shadow Detection SBU / SBU-Refine FSDNet (TIP 2021) (256x256) BER 7.16 #15 of 16 Archive leaderboard report

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