Video Information Retrieval and Editing. Image-based Building Shadow Generation by Shape from Shadow Silhouette Technique.

Abstract

The study on image-based method, such as image-based rendering, image-based object, promotes a new problem called Image-based Shadow Generation. Image-based shadow generation aims at generating new shadows from a few reference images. As a start of the image-based shadow generation problem, building, as a representative of man-made object, is chosen as our study object in this paper. To solve the problem of image-based building shadow generation, we propose a new technique called shape from shadow silhouette, which reconstructs 3D model of building. This technique consists of three steps : shadow extracting & transforming, shadow complementing, and shape modeling. By this technique, the rough 3D model of building can be recovered from several reference shadow images, then new shadow can be generated easily and quickly by this recovered model. The experimental results are given in this paper. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated by the results.