Single image shadow detection via uncertainty analysis and GCN-based refinement strategy

Learning-based shadow detection methods have achieved an impressive performance, while these works still struggle on complex scenes, especially ambiguous soft shadows. To tackle this issue, this work proposes an efficient shadow detection network (ESDNet) and then applies uncertainty analysis and graph convolutional networks for detection refinement. Specifically, we first aggregate global information from high-level features and harvest shadow details in low-level features for obtaining an initial prediction. Secondly, we analyze the uncertainty of our ESDNet for an input shadow image and then take its intensity, expectation, and entropy into account to formulate a semi-supervised graph learning problem. Finally, we solve this problem by training a graph convolution network to obtain the refined detection result for every training image. To evaluate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets, i.e., SBU, UCF, ISTD, and even on soft shadow scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategy can improve shadow detection performance by suppressing the uncertainties of false positive and false negative regions, achieving state-of-the-art results.