Shadow removal based on YCbCr color space

• A new and effective shadow removal method without shadow detection is proposed.
• An original image is converted to YCbCr color space and the Y channel is decomposed into a base layer and a detail layer.
• The YCbCr color space is used widely in digital video.
• Luminance information is represented by a single component, Y, and color information is stored as two color difference components, Cb and Cr.
• The intrinsic image which is derived from a chromaticity diagram is dealt with as the steps above.

Shadows are physical phenomena observed in most natural scenes. Shadows in an image can cause segmentation, tracking, or recognition algorithms to fail. In this paper, we give a research on the assumptions introduced in most researches about the complexity of shadow removal from a single image and the classification of shadow images. The purpose of this paper is twofold: in the first place, it provides a comprehensive survey of the problems and challenges which may occur when removing shadows from a single image. In the second place, an idea of shadow removal is presented, in which an attempt is made to overcome some of the fundamental problems such as illumination, color constancy, and type of reflection. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect and eliminate the shadows effectively.