BACKGROUND Cast shadows in visual scenes can have profound effects on visual perception. Much as they are informative, they also constitute noise as they are salient features of the visual scene potentially interfering with the processing of other features. Here we asked i) whether individuals with autism can exploit the information conveyed by cast shadows; ii) whether they are especially sens...

Scenes with cast shadows can produce complex sets of images. These images cannot be well approximated by lowdimensional linear subspaces. However, in this paper we show that the set of images produced by a Lambertian scene with cast shadows can be efficiently represented by a sparse set of images generated by directional light sources. We first model an image with cast shadows as composed of a ...

Scenes with cast shadows can produce complex sets of images. These images cannot be well approximated by lowdimensional linear subspaces. However, in this paper we show that the set of images produced by a Lambertian scene with cast shadows can be efficiently represented by a sparse set of images generated by directional light sources. We first model an image with cast shadows as composed of a ...

In the infrared spectrum, two contributions to shadows exist: one part is reflective shadows resulting from occlusion of instantly reflected infrared rays, and the other part is thermal (IR) shadows occurring through occlusion of irradiance in the past. The realization of thermal shadows requires a thermal balance calculation in four-dimensions (three-dimensional geometry in one-dimensional tim...

Shadows often confound algorithms designed to solve computer vision tasks such as image segmentation, object detection and tracking. In this paper, a shadow detection and removal technique is proposed. The method requires no camera calibration or other a priori information regarding the scene. Support vector machines are used to identify shadow boundaries based on their boundary properties. Thi...