CNSNet: A Cleanness-Navigated-Shadow Network for Shadow Removal

The key to shadow removal is recovering the contents of the shadow regions with the guidance of the non-shadow regions. Due to the inadequate long-range modeling, the CNN-based approaches cannot thoroughly investigate the information from the non-shadow regions. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cleanness-navigated-shadow network (CNSNet), with a shadow-oriented adaptive normalization (SOAN) module and a shadow-aware aggregation with transformer (SAAT) module based on the shadow mask. Under the guidance of the shadow mask, the SOAN module formulates the statistics from the non-shadow region and adaptively applies them to the shadow region for region-wise restoration. The SAAT module utilizes the shadow mask to precisely guide the restoration of each shadowed pixel by considering the highly relevant pixels from the shadow-free regions for global pixel-wise restoration. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD) show that our method achieves superior de-shadowing performance.