SHADOW DETECTION AND REMOVAL IN AERIAL IMAGES USING GAUSSIAN MIXTURE-BASED BACKGROUND AND FOREGROUND SEGMENTATION ALGORITHM

The presence of shadows has been responsible for reducing the reliability of many computer vision algorithms, such as segmentation, object detection, scene analysis, stereo, tracking, etc. Therefore, shadow detection and removal is an important pre-processing step for improving performance of such computer vision tasks. It is performed by decomposition of a single image into a shadow image and a shadow-free image is a difficult problem, due to complex interactions of geometry, albedo and illumination. Many techniques have been proposed over the years, but shadow detection still remains an extremely challenging problem, particularly from a single image. Our goal is to develop a system that can automatically detect shadow regions and then remove from simple images. While detecting all shadows is expected to remain hard, we have to make some constraints related to the structure of images. We have presented an algorithm to automatically detect shadows and remove them from simple consumer images. Our algorithms are developed using Matlab.