This AI Removes Shadows From Your Photos!

Casual portrait photographs often suffer from unwanted lighting and shadowing because of suboptimal conditions in the environment. Aesthetics such as the position and softness of shadows and the lighting ratio between the bright and dark parts of the face are frequently determined by the constraints of the environment rather than by the photographer. 

We all click multiple selfies and photographs from different angles and lighting conditions to get that right mix of highlights upon our face that will express our beauty to its full extent but! From those multiple selfies you take, most of them are purged because of bad lighting or unwanted shadows.

Only if there was a way to remove shadows make your job easier to click that perfect selfie well fear not! 



These images demonstrate the capability of this new AI to remove shadows from the images, the left-most is the input image, the middle one is the real image with no shadows and desired lighting, the rightmost is the final result of the AI 

This new AI that I am about to introduce you to will remove the unwanted lights and shadows for you after you take the picture!

This work proposes the possibility of editing shadows in the photos we would usually transfer to the bin, as described by Cecilia Zhang this is

“… a computational approach that gives casual photographers control to manipulate shadows and lighting on portraits, allowing poorly lit faces to be relit post-capture in a realistic and controllable way”

the link to the paper is in the below-given references*

 


The shadows that we are going to be dealing in a portrait can be divided into two parts First the foreign shadow, these are the shadows that are projected onto the subject by the external objects/surroundings for example hats, spectacle frames trees or window frames and so on.

The second source of the shadow will be the subject itself, facial shadow, the contours of the face depending upon the direction of light will project shadow for example the shadow of the nose of shadow produced because of your smile as pointed out in the reference pictures below.



The foreign shadows must be removed completely but the facial ones must only be editing or else it will produce a fake flat looking face with no sense of 3 dimensions.

The research team took photographs that were not suffering from any shadows, and then they added shadows in them! They also added subsurface scattering which is a fancy way of saying the light that is scattered under the skin was also taken into account in the shadows they artificially added 

 


     Above are some more examples of this AI* 

 

                without subsurface scattering                        with subsurface scattering 

After training their neural network to generate images that will remove these artificial shadows, they compared the result with the ground truth image . and the results were promising   

 

There will be further research to perfect this AI for practical use in our daily life, two more research paper is going to be added onto this mind-blowing new software technology.