• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.419-428
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• 2021

Shadow removal plays a key role for the pre-processing of image processing techniques such as object tracking and detection. With the advances of image recognition based on deep convolution neural networks, researches for shadow removal have been actively conducted. In this paper, we propose a novel method for shadow removal, which utilizes self attention distillation to extract semantic features. The proposed method gradually refines results of shadow detection, which are extracted from each layer of the proposed network, via top-down distillation. Specifically, the training procedure can be efficiently performed by learning the contextual information for shadow removal without shadow masks. Experimental results on various datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method for shadow removal under real world environments.