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Main Authors: Yu, Wanchang, Zhang, Qing, Zheng, Rongjia, Zheng, Wei-Shi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04692
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author Yu, Wanchang
Zhang, Qing
Zheng, Rongjia
Zheng, Wei-Shi
author_facet Yu, Wanchang
Zhang, Qing
Zheng, Rongjia
Zheng, Wei-Shi
contents We present a diffusion-based portrait shadow removal approach that can robustly produce high-fidelity results. Unlike previous methods, we cast shadow removal as diffusion-based inpainting. To this end, we first train a shadow-independent structure extraction network on a real-world portrait dataset with various synthetic lighting conditions, which allows to generate a shadow-independent structure map including facial details while excluding the unwanted shadow boundaries. The structure map is then used as condition to train a structure-guided inpainting diffusion model for removing shadows in a generative manner. Finally, to restore the fine-scale details (e.g., eyelashes, moles and spots) that may not be captured by the structure map, we take the gradients inside the shadow regions as guidance and train a detail restoration diffusion model to refine the shadow removal result. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our method clearly outperforms existing methods, and is effective to avoid previously common issues such as facial identity tampering, shadow residual, color distortion, structure blurring, and loss of details. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanchang-yu/Structure-Guided-Diffusion-for-Portrait-Shadow-Removal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure-Guided Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Portrait Shadow Removal
Yu, Wanchang
Zhang, Qing
Zheng, Rongjia
Zheng, Wei-Shi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present a diffusion-based portrait shadow removal approach that can robustly produce high-fidelity results. Unlike previous methods, we cast shadow removal as diffusion-based inpainting. To this end, we first train a shadow-independent structure extraction network on a real-world portrait dataset with various synthetic lighting conditions, which allows to generate a shadow-independent structure map including facial details while excluding the unwanted shadow boundaries. The structure map is then used as condition to train a structure-guided inpainting diffusion model for removing shadows in a generative manner. Finally, to restore the fine-scale details (e.g., eyelashes, moles and spots) that may not be captured by the structure map, we take the gradients inside the shadow regions as guidance and train a detail restoration diffusion model to refine the shadow removal result. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our method clearly outperforms existing methods, and is effective to avoid previously common issues such as facial identity tampering, shadow residual, color distortion, structure blurring, and loss of details. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanchang-yu/Structure-Guided-Diffusion-for-Portrait-Shadow-Removal.
title Structure-Guided Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Portrait Shadow Removal
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04692