  In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage context-aware network named CANet
for shadow removal, in which the contextual information from non-shadow regions
is transferred to shadow regions at the embedded feature spaces. At Stage-I, we
propose a contextual patch matching (CPM) module to generate a set of potential
matching pairs of shadow and non-shadow patches. Combined with the potential
contextual relationships between shadow and non-shadow regions, our
well-designed contextual feature transfer (CFT) mechanism can transfer
contextual information from non-shadow to shadow regions at different scales.
With the reconstructed feature maps, we remove shadows at L and A/B channels
separately. At Stage-II, we use an encoder-decoder to refine current results
and generate the final shadow removal results. We evaluate our proposed CANet
on two benchmark datasets and some real-world shadow images with complex
scenes. Extensive experimental results strongly demonstrate the efficacy of our
proposed CANet and exhibit superior performance to state-of-the-arts.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition