Leveraging Contrast Information for Efficient Document Shadow Removal

Document shadows are a major obstacle in the digitization process. Due to the dense information in text and patterns covered by shadows, document shadow removal requires specialized methods. Existing document shadow removal methods, although showing some progress, still rely on additional information such as shadow masks or lack generalization and effectiveness across different shadow scenarios. This often results in incomplete shadow removal or loss of original document content and tones. Moreover, these methods tend to underutilize the information present in the original shadowed document image. In this paper, we refocus our approach on the document images themselves, which inherently contain rich information.We propose an end-to-end document shadow removal method guided by contrast representation, following a coarse-to-fine refinement approach. By extracting document contrast information, we can effectively and quickly locate shadow shapes and positions without the need for additional masks. This information is then integrated into the refined shadow removal process, providing better guidance for network-based removal and feature fusion. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.