A method of generating virtual shadow dataset of buildings for the shadow detection and removal

Detecting shadows in images and restoring or removing them was a very challenging task in computer vision. Traditional researches used color information, edges, and thresholds to detect shadows, but there were errors such as not considering the penumbra area of shadow or even detecting a black area that is not a shadow. Deep learning has been successful in various fields of computer vision, and research on applying deep learning has started in the field of shadow detection and removal. However, it was very difficult and time-consuming to collect data for network learning, and there were many limited conditions for shooting. In particular, it was more difficult to obtain shadow data from buildings and satellite images, which hindered the progress of the research. In this paper, we propose a method for generating shadow data from buildings and satellites using Unity3D. In the virtual Unity space, 3D objects existing in the real world were placed, and shadows were generated using lights effects to shoot. Through this, it is possible to get all three types of images (shadow-free, shadow image, shadow mask) necessary for shadow detection and removal when training deep learning networks. The method proposed in this paper contributes to helping the progress of the research by providing big data in the field of building or satellite shadow detection and removal research, which is difficult for learning deep learning networks due to the absence of data. And this can be a suboptimal method. We believe that we have contributed in that we can apply virtual data to test deep learning networks before applying real data.