Papers › Shadow Detection With Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Shadow Detection With Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

1 Oct 2017ICCV 2017 10archive 2025-07-28

Vu Nguyen, Tomas F. Yago Vicente, Maozheng Zhao, Minh Hoai, Dimitris Samaras

We introduce scGAN, a novel extension of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) tailored for the challenging problem of shadow detection in images. Previous methods for shadow detection focus on learning the local appearance of shadow regions, while using limited local context reasoning in the form of pairwise potentials in a Conditional Random Field. In contrast, the proposed adversarial approach is able to model higher level relationships and global scene characteristics. We train a shadow detector that corresponds to the generator of a conditional GAN, and augment its shadow accuracy by combining the typical GAN loss with a data loss term. Due to the unbalanced distribution of the shadow labels, we use weighted cross entropy. With the standard GAN architecture, properly setting the weight for the cross entropy would require training multiple GANs, a computationally expensive grid procedure. In scGAN, we introduce an additional sensitivity parameter w to the generator. The proposed approach effectively parameterizes the loss of the trained detector. The resulting shadow detector is a single network that can generate shadow maps corresponding to different sensitivity levels, obviating the need for multiple models and a costly training procedure. We evaluate our method on the large-scale SBU and UCF shadow datasets, and observe up to 17% error reduction with respect to the previous state-of-the-art method.

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Tasks

SensitivityShadow Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
RGB Salient Object Detection ISTD scGAN Balanced Error Rate 8.98 #6 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
RGB Salient Object Detection SBU / SBU-Refine scGAN Balanced Error Rate 9.10 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
RGB Salient Object Detection UCF scGAN Balanced Error Rate 11.50 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report

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