Bidirectional feature pyramid network with recurrent attention residual modules for shadow detection

This paper presents a network to detect shadows by exploring and combining global context in deep layers and local context in shallow layers of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). There are two technical contributions in our network design. First, we formulate the recurrent attention residual (RAR) module to combine the contexts in two adjacent CNN layers and learn an attention map to select a residual and then refine the context features. Second, we develop a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BFPN) to aggregate shadow contexts spanned across different CNN layers by deploying two series of RAR modules in the network to iteratively combine and refine context features: one series to refine context features from deep to shallow layers, and another series from shallow to deep layers. Hence, we can better suppress false detections and enhance shadow details at the same time. We evaluate our network on two common shadow detection benchmark datasets: SBU and UCF. Experimental results show that our network outperforms the best existing method with 34.88% reduction on SBU and 34.57% reduction on UCF for the balance error rate.