  Estimating the reflectance layer from a single image is a challenging task.
It becomes more challenging when the input image contains shadows or specular
highlights, which often render an inaccurate estimate of the reflectance layer.
Therefore, we propose a two-stage learning method, including reflectance
guidance and a Shadow/Specular-Aware (S-Aware) network to tackle the problem.
In the first stage, an initial reflectance layer free from shadows and
specularities is obtained with the constraint of novel losses that are guided
by prior-based shadow-free and specular-free images. To further enforce the
reflectance layer to be independent of shadows and specularities in the
second-stage refinement, we introduce an S-Aware network that distinguishes the
reflectance image from the input image. Our network employs a classifier to
categorize shadow/shadow-free, specular/specular-free classes, enabling the
activation features to function as attention maps that focus on shadow/specular
regions. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the reflectance layer estimation
that is free from shadows and specularities. Code is at:
\url{https://github.com/jinyeying/S-Aware-network}.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition