# ShaDocNet: Learning Spatial-Aware Tokens in Transformer for Document Shadow Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16675 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16675/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Stacked Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Jointly Learning Shadow Detection and Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02478/) (2017)
- [Towards Ghost-free Shadow Removal via Dual Hierarchical Aggregation Network and Shadow Matting GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08718/) (2019)
- [Single Image Reflection Separation with Perceptual Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05376/) (2018)
- [Auto-Exposure Fusion for Single-Image Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01255/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Separated Curve Rendering Network for Efficient and High-Resolution Image Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05750/) (2021)
- [Fine Perceptive GANs for Brain MR Image Super-Resolution in Wavelet Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04145/) (2020)
- [Blind Visual Motif Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02756/) (2019)
- [Water-Filling: An Efficient Algorithm for Digitized Document Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09763/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [High-Resolution Document Shadow Removal via A Large-Scale Real-World Dataset and A Frequency-Aware Shadow Erasing Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14221/) (2023)
- [DOPRA: Decoding Over-accumulation Penalization and Re-allocation in Specific Weighting Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15130/) (2024)
- [SMAFormer: Synergistic Multi-Attention Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00346/) (2024)
- [Test-Time Intensity Consistency Adaptation for Shadow Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07695/) (2024)
- [Top-K Pooling with Patch Contrastive Learning for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09828/) (2023)
- [DocDeshadower: Frequency-Aware Transformer for Document Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15318/) (2023)
- [Implicit Multi-Spectral Transformer: An Lightweight and Effective Visible to Infrared Image Translation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07072/) (2024)
- [LensNet: An End-to-End Learning Framework for Empirical Point Spread Function Modeling and Lensless Imaging Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01755/) (2025)
- [ShaDocFormer: A Shadow-Attentive Threshold Detector With Cascaded Fusion Refiner for Document Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06670/) (2023)
- [UIE-UnFold: Deep Unfolding Network with Color Priors and Vision Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10653/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Contrast Information for Efficient Document Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00385/) (2025)
- [Medical Visual Prompting (MVP): A Unified Framework for Versatile and High-Quality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01127/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Query Prompting for Multi-Domain Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01194/) (2024)
- [TAGE: Trustworthy Attribute Group Editing for Stable Few-shot Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17855/) (2024)
- [DocShaDiffusion: Diffusion Model in Latent Space for Document Image Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01422/) (2025)
- [MatteViT: High-Frequency-Aware Document Shadow Removal with Shadow Matte Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08789/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Shadow removal improves the visual quality and legibility of digital copies of documents. However, document shadow removal remains an unresolved subject. Traditional techniques rely on heuristics that vary from situation to situation. Given the quality and quantity of current public datasets, the majority of neural network models are ill-equipped for this task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model for document shadow removal that utilizes shadow context encoding and decoding in both shadow and shadow-free regions. Additionally, shadow detection and pixel-level enhancement are included in the whole coarse-to-fine process. On the basis of comprehensive benchmark evaluations, it is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.