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Main Authors: Beltrame, Lorenzo, Salzinger, Jules, Svoboda, Filip, Fanta-Jende, Phillipp, Lampert, Jasmin, Timofte, Radu, Körner, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03610
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author Beltrame, Lorenzo
Salzinger, Jules
Svoboda, Filip
Fanta-Jende, Phillipp
Lampert, Jasmin
Timofte, Radu
Körner, Marco
author_facet Beltrame, Lorenzo
Salzinger, Jules
Svoboda, Filip
Fanta-Jende, Phillipp
Lampert, Jasmin
Timofte, Radu
Körner, Marco
contents Shadows cast by terrain and tall structures remain a major obstacle for high-resolution satellite image analysis, degrading classification, detection, and 3D reconstruction performance. Public resources offering geometry-consistent paired shadow/shadow-free satellite imagery are essentially missing, and most Earth-observation datasets are designed for shadow detection or 3D modelling rather than removal. Existing deep shadow-removal datasets either target ground-level or aerial scenes or rely on unpaired and weakly supervised formulations rather than explicit satellite pairs. We address this gap with deSEO, a geometry-aware and physics-informed methodology that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to derive paired supervision for satellite shadow removal from the S-EO shadow detection dataset through a fully replicable pipeline. For each tile, deSEO selects a minimally shadowed acquisition as a weak reference and pairs it with shadowed counterparts using temporal and geometric filtering, Jacobian-based orientation normalisation, and LoFTR-RANSAC registration. A per-pixel validity mask restricts learning to reliably aligned regions, enabling supervision despite residual off-nadir parallax. In addition to this paired dataset, we develop a DSM-aware deshadowing model that combines residual translation, perceptual objectives, and mask-constrained adversarial learning. In contrast, a direct adaptation of a UAV-based SRNet/pix2pix architecture fails to converge under satellite viewpoint variability. Our model consistently reduces the visual impact of cast shadows across diverse illumination and viewing conditions, achieving improved structural and perceptual fidelity on held-out scenes. deSEO therefore provides the first reproducible, geometry-aware paired dataset and baseline for shadow removal in satellite Earth observation.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle deSEO: Physics-Aware Dataset Creation for High-Resolution Satellite Image Shadow Removal
Beltrame, Lorenzo
Salzinger, Jules
Svoboda, Filip
Fanta-Jende, Phillipp
Lampert, Jasmin
Timofte, Radu
Körner, Marco
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Shadows cast by terrain and tall structures remain a major obstacle for high-resolution satellite image analysis, degrading classification, detection, and 3D reconstruction performance. Public resources offering geometry-consistent paired shadow/shadow-free satellite imagery are essentially missing, and most Earth-observation datasets are designed for shadow detection or 3D modelling rather than removal. Existing deep shadow-removal datasets either target ground-level or aerial scenes or rely on unpaired and weakly supervised formulations rather than explicit satellite pairs. We address this gap with deSEO, a geometry-aware and physics-informed methodology that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to derive paired supervision for satellite shadow removal from the S-EO shadow detection dataset through a fully replicable pipeline. For each tile, deSEO selects a minimally shadowed acquisition as a weak reference and pairs it with shadowed counterparts using temporal and geometric filtering, Jacobian-based orientation normalisation, and LoFTR-RANSAC registration. A per-pixel validity mask restricts learning to reliably aligned regions, enabling supervision despite residual off-nadir parallax. In addition to this paired dataset, we develop a DSM-aware deshadowing model that combines residual translation, perceptual objectives, and mask-constrained adversarial learning. In contrast, a direct adaptation of a UAV-based SRNet/pix2pix architecture fails to converge under satellite viewpoint variability. Our model consistently reduces the visual impact of cast shadows across diverse illumination and viewing conditions, achieving improved structural and perceptual fidelity on held-out scenes. deSEO therefore provides the first reproducible, geometry-aware paired dataset and baseline for shadow removal in satellite Earth observation.
title deSEO: Physics-Aware Dataset Creation for High-Resolution Satellite Image Shadow Removal
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03610