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Shadow Patching: Exemplar-Based Shadow Removal, Ryan Sears Hintze

Theses and Dissertations

Shadow removal is an important problem for both artists and algorithms. Previous methods handle some shadows well but, because they rely on the shadowed data, perform poorly in cases with severe degradation. Image-completion algorithms can completely replace severely degraded shadowed regions, and perform well with smaller-scale textures, but often fail to reproduce larger-scale macrostructure that may still be visible in the shadowed region. This paper provides a general framework that leverages degraded (e.g., shadowed) data to guide the image completion process by extending the objective function commonly used in current state-of-the-art image completion energy-minimization methods. This approach achieves realistic shadow …