Deshadowing of Urban Airborne Imagery Based on Object-Oriented Automatic Shadow Detection and Regional Matching Compensation

With the increase of the spatial resolution of aerial images, the shadow problem is more prominent. The shadows affect the applications such as object recognition, image dense matching, and object classification. Existing shadow detection methods can acquire results with high accuracy, but usually need much manual intervention and the traditional stretch models generally lead to color distortion and undercompensation. Therefore, we propose an object-oriented automatic shadow detection method without manual intervention and a shadow compensation method by regional matching. In the proposed method, pixel-based soft shadow detection, which uses Gaussian mixture model to simulate the gray distribution and refines soft shadow map with guiled filtering, is combined with image segmentation result to obtain accurate shadow regions with complete shape and no hole. Then shadow regions are compensated, with less loss of details and brightness imbalance, referring to their optimal homogeneous nonshadow region obtained by regional matching based on Bag-of-Words. The total variation model is used to decrease the noise amplified by the pixel-based stretch and boundary effect in the result. Experiments are performed on three publicly available high-resolution aerial images to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods. It shows that the proposed method can accurately detect shadows from urban high-resolution aerial images with an overall rate of over 88%. The compensation results display excellent visual effects compared with the state-of-the-art methods, consistent with the true color of ground objects.