Pavement Cracks Coupled With Shadows:A New Shadow-Crack Dataset and A Shadow-Removal-Oriented Crack Detection Approach

Automatic pavement crack detection is a critical task for maintaining the pavement stability and driving safety.The task is challenging because the shadows on the pavement may have similar intensity with the crack,which interfere with the crack detection performance.Till to the present,there still lacks efficient algorithm models and training datasets to deal with the interference brought by the shadows.To fill in the gap,we made several contributions as follows.First,we proposed a new pavement shadow and crack dataset,which contains a variety of shadow and pavement pixel size combinations.It also covers all common cracks(linear cracks and network cracks),placing higher demands on crack detection methods.Second,we designed a two-step shadow-removal-oriented crack detection approach:SROCD,which improves the performance of the algorithm by first removing the shadow and then detecting it.In addition to shadows,the method can cope with other noise disturbances.Third,we explored the mechanism of how shadows affect crack detection.Based on this mechanism,we propose a data augmentation method based on the difference in brightness values,which can adapt to brightness changes caused by seasonal and weather changes.Finally,we introduced a residual feature augmentation algorithm to detect small cracks that can predict sudden disasters,and the algorithm improves the performance of the model overall.We compare our method with the state-of-the-art methods on existing pavement crack datasets and the shadow-crack dataset,and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Moving Shadow Detection and Removal for Traffic Sequences

Segmentation of moving objects in a video sequence is a basic task for application of computer vision. However, shadows extracted along with the objects can result in large errors in object localization and recognition. In this paper, we propose a method of moving shadow detection based on edge information, which can effectively detect the cast shadow of a moving vehicle in a traffic scene. Having confirmed shadows existing in a figure, we execute the shadow removal algorithm proposed in this paper to segment the shadow from the foreground. The shadow eliminating algorithm removes the boundary of the cast shadow and preserves object edges firstly; secondly, it reconstructs coarse object shapes based on the edge information of objects; and finally, it extracts the cast shadow by subtracting the moving object from the change detection mask and performs further processing. The proposed method has been further tested on images taken under different shadow orientations, vehicle colors and vehicle sizes, and the results have revealed that shadows can be successfully eliminated and thus good video segmentation can be obtained.

Shadow Detection and Removal From Photo-Realistic Synthetic Urban Image Using Deep Learning

Recently,virtual reality technology that can interact with various data is used for urban design and analysis.Reality,one of the most important elements in virtual reality technology,means visual expression so that a person can experience three-dimensional space like reality.To obtain this realism,real-world data are used in the various fields.For example,in order to increase the realism of 3D modeled building textures real aerial images are utilized in 3D modelling.However,the aerial image captured during the day can be shadowed by the sun and it can cause the distortion or deterioration of image.To resolve this problem,researches on detecting and removing shadows have been conducted,but the detecting and removing shadow is still considered as a challenging problem.In this paper,we propose a novel method for detecting and removing shadows using deep learning.For this work,we first a build a new dataset of photo-realistic synthetic urban data based on the virtual environment using 3D spatial information provided by VWORLD.For detecting and removing shadow from the dataset,firstly,the 1-channel shadow mask image is inferred from the 3-channel shadow image through the CNN.Then,to generate a shadow-free image,a 3-channel shadow image and a detected 1-channel shadow mask into the GAN is executed.From the experiments,we can prove that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in detecting and removing shadow.

Automatic detection and removal of static shadows

In case of complex textures,existing static shadow detection and removal algorithms are prone to false detection of the pixels.To solve this problem,a static shadow detection and removal algorithm based on support vector machine(SVM)and region sub-block matching is proposed.Firstly,the original image is segmented into several superpixels,and these superpixels are clustered using mean-shift clustering algorithm in the superpixel sets.Secondly,these features such as color,texture,brightness,intensity and similarity of each area are extracted.These features are used as input of SVM to obtain shadow binary images through training in non-operational state.Thirdly,soft matting is used to smooth the boundary of shadow binary graph.Finally,after finding the best matching sub-block for shadow sub-block in the illumination region based on regional covariance feature and spatial distance,the shadow weighted average factor is introduced to partially correct the sub-block,and the light recovery operator is used to partially light the sub-block.The experimental results show the number of false detection of the pixels is reduced.In addition,it can remove shadows effectively for the image with rich textures and uneven shadows and make a natural transition at the boundary between shadow and light.