Cast Shadow Removal in a Hierarchical Manner Using MRF

In this paper, we present a novel method for shadow removal using Markov random fields (MRF). In our method, we first construct the shadow model in a hierarchical manner. At the pixel level, we use the Gaussian mixture model to model the behavior of cast shadows for every pixel in the HSV color space. The samples which are used to update the shadow model should satisfy a pre-classifier. This pre-classifier indicates the color feature of shadow in current frame. At the global level, we exploit the statistical features of shadow in the whole scene over several consecutive frames to make this pre-classifier accurate and adaptive to the change of shadow. Then, based on the shadow model, an MRF model is constructed for shadow removal. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, although our method is a chroma-based method, we make the pre-classifier accurate and adaptive to the change of shadow by using the statistical features of shadow at the global level. Moreover, tracking information can make this global-level statistical information more robust. Second, we construct an MRF model to represent the dependencies between the label of a pixel and the shadow models of its neighbors. Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient and robust.