A System of the Shadow Detection and Shadow Removal for High Resolution City Aerial Photo

This paper presents a methodology to automatically detect and remove the shadows in high-resolution urban aerial images for urban GIS applications. The system includes cast shadow computation, image shadow tracing and detection, and shadow removal. The cast shadow is computed from digital surface model (DSM) and the sun altitudes. Its projection in the pseudo orthogonal image is determined by ray tracing using ADS40 model, DSM and RGB image. In this step, all the cast shadows will be traced to determine if they are visible in the projection image. We used parameter plane transform (PPT) to accelerate the tracing speed. An iterative tracing scheme is proposed. Because of the under precision of the DSM, the fine shadow segmentation is taken on the base of the traced shadow. The DSM itself is short of the details, but the traced shadow gives the primarily correct location in the image. The statistics of the shadow area reflects the intensity distribution approximately. A reference segmentation threshold is obtained by the mean of the shadow area. In the fine segmentation, the segmentation threshold is derived from the histogram of the image and the reference threshold. The shadow removal includes shadow region and partner region labeling, the histogram processing, and intensity mapping. The adjacent shadows are labeled as a region. The corresponding bright region is selected and labeled as its partner. The bright region supplies the reference in the intensity mapping in the removal step.