Boundary-Aware Divide and Conquer: A Diffusion-Based Solution for Unsupervised Shadow Removal

Recent deep learning methods have achieved superior results in shadow removal. However, most of these supervised methods rely on training over a huge amount of shadow and shadow-free image pairs, which require laborious annotations and may end up with poor model generalization. Shadows, in fact, only form partial degradation in images, while their non-shadow regions provide rich structural information potentially for unsupervised learning. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based solution for unsupervised shadow removal, which separately models the shadow, non-shadow, and their boundary regions. We employ a pretrained unconditional diffusion model fused with non-corrupted information to generate the natural shadow-free image. While the diffusion model can restore the clear structure in the boundary region by utilizing its adjacent non-corrupted contextual information, it fails to address the inner shadow area due to the isolation of the non-corrupted contexts. Thus we further propose a Shadow-Invariant Intrinsic Decomposition module to exploit the underlying reflectance in the shadow region to maintain structural consistency during the diffusive sampling. Extensive experiments on the publicly available shadow removal datasets show that the proposed method achieves a significant improvement compared to existing unsupervised methods, and even is comparable with some existing supervised methods.