Removing shadows from Google Earth images

Abstract

Google Earth uses aerial and satellite images from various sources as its background. It is designed to enable every person who owns a computer to easily ‘fly’ to aerial views of any location on the planet. However, just as with ordinary aerial or satellite images, there inevitably exist shadows in Google Earth images, making some ground objects obscured, even unidentifiable. In this paper, we describe a model we have developed for image shadow removal that uses radiative transfer theory in combination with prior knowledge to compensate for the lost information over shadow areas. We arbitrarily selected six images with severe shadows from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, respectively, for algorithm testing. Our experimental results show that shadows in images can be considerably suppressed.

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by a hundredth talent grant from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.