The Visual Computer

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-024-03278-6

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised shadow

detection via label augmentation
Hongyu Chen1 · Xiao-Diao Chen1,2 · Wen Wu1 · Wenya Yang1 · Xiaoyang Mao3

Accepted: 11 January 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024

Abstract
Shadow detection is essential for scene understanding and image restoration. Existing paradigms for producing shadow
detection training data usually rely on densely labeling each image pixel, which will lead to a bottleneck when scaling up the
number of images. To tackle this problem, by labeling shadow images with only a few strokes, this paper designs a learning
framework for Weakly supervised Shadow Detection, namely WSD. Firstly, it creates two shadow detection datasets with
scribble annotations, namely Scr-SBU and Scr-ISTD. Secondly, it proposes an uncertainty-guided label augmentation scheme
based on graph convolutional networks, which can propagate the sparse scribble annotations to more reliable regions, and
then avoid the model converging to an undesired local minima as intra-class discontinuity. Finally, it introduces a multi-task
learning framework to jointly learn for shadow detection and edge detection, which encourages generated shadow maps to
be comprehensive and well aligned with shadow boundaries. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that
our framework even outperforms existing semi-supervised and fully supervised shadow detectors requiring only 2% pixels
to be labeled.

Keywords Image segmentation · Shadow detection · Weakly supervised · Graph convolutional network · Uncertainty analysis

1 Introduction 54] in these cases can obviously improve accuracy. More-

over, shadows can provide valuable cues for inferencing
The presence of shadows in natural images tends to change scene geometry [19, 21, 36], camera parameters [49], and
the intensity, color, and texture of the occluded image regions. light source localization [27, 37]. In recent years, shadow
Therefore, shadows often hamper the performance in var- detection [4, 50, 52, 53] has achieved significant progress
ious vision tasks, i.e., image segmentation [10] and object due to the development of deep models. However, deep
detection [7, 34]. Detecting and removing shadows [51, networks are extremely data hungry, typically requiring
pixel-level human-annotated datasets to achieve high per-
B Xiao-Diao Chen formance. Hence, seeking weak supervisory signals is very
xiaodiao@hdu.edu.cn meaningful to shadow detection as it can significantly reduce
B Wen Wu labeling costs and enable models to scale much easier than
wuwen.hdu.cs@gmail.com fully supervised methods.
B Wenya Yang The common weak labels in the image segmentation
yangwenya@hdu.edu.cn communities are as follows: image-level category label [3],
Hongyu Chen bounding box [38], point [9], and scribble [43]. The image-
chenhongyu651@gmail.com level labels are often used with the class activate map [64],
Xiaoyang Mao which aims to locate the most discriminative regions for a cer-
mao@yamanashi.ac.jp tain object. Obviously, representing the complicated shadows
1 in an image by one or more category labels is impossible. In
School of Computer Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University,
Hangzhou, China addition, the bounding boxes and points may only be suitable
2 for simple scenes where shadow distribution is relatively con-
Xinchuang Haihe Laboratory, Tianjin, China
centrated or scattered. So we choose to relabel two widely
3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, used shadow detection datasets (i.e., SBU [46], and ISTD
University of Yamanashi, Kofu, Japan

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(a) Scribble annotations (b) Densely labeling
(e) Baseline (f ) Edge map
Fig. 1 A training example in our weakly supervised shadow detection framework
[47]), namely Scr-SBU and Scr-ISTD, with flexible scribble
(Fig. 1a).
Compared to densely labeling (Fig. 1b), scribble anno-
tation can reduce the labeling cost by 20–40 times. Since
scribble annotations are generally sparse, it will bring with
us a new challenge: deep models training on them are prone to
be trapped into an undesired local minima as intra-class dis-
continuity, i.e., shadow regions often cover multiple materials
with different textures. Fortunately, the above problem can
be alleviated by exploring more pixel-level training samples.
Thanks to the powerful capability of label propagation from
the graph convolutional networks (GCNs) [23, 60], we pro-
pose a novel label augmentation scheme, which can expand
sparse scribble to denser annotation (Fig. 1c and d) by prop-
agating the label information among superpixel nodes and
conducting uncertainty analysis for GCN outputs.
One can observe that even the augmented annotations are
still hard to align with the edges of shadows, resulting in poor
boundary localization of shadow maps (Fig. 1e). Inspired
by a recent semi-supervised shadow detector, MTMT-Net
[5], they introduce a shadow edge detection task to produce
feature highlight shadow structures. However, this manner
is not suitable for us because of the following two reasons.
Firstly, the shadow edge masks in MTMT-Net are extracted
from GT shadow masks, which means this method still relies
on pixel-level densely labeling and it goes against the original
intention of weakly supervised learning. Secondly, the severe
noisy labels in GT shadow masks lead to the extracted shadow
edge masks not being well aligned with shadow boundaries,
resulting in an unsatisfactory shadow edge detection result.
To tackle this problem, we introduce an edge detection
task instead of shadow edge detection. Note that the GT
edge maps (Fig. 1f) in our task are produced by a state-of-
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H. Chen et al.
(c) Weak augmentation (d) Strong augmentation
(g) Multi-task learning (h) WSD (ours)
the-art (SOTA) edge detector—EDTER [39]. When we train
the shadow detection and edge detection task jointly, edge
detection can provide rich edge features for shadow detec-
tion. However, so many structure details will exist in the
non-shadow regions (Fig. 1g). Inspired by gated structure-
aware loss [61], we adopt it to focus only on shadow regions
and ignore the structure of non-shadow regions. By doing
these, we can generate shadow maps with smoothing pre-
dictions inside shadow and non-shadow regions, and clear
boundaries at the shadow edges (Fig. 1h). Extensive exper-
iments show that our WSD outperforms the SOTA shadow
detectors with only labeling around 2% pixels. The three
main contributions are summarized as follows.
1. To alleviate the reliance on dense labeling, we present a
weakly supervised shadow detection (WSD) framework
and create two corresponding shadow detection datasets
with scribble annotation. Experimental results demon-
strate that our WSD can perform comparably to SOTA
semi-supervised and fully supervised shadow detectors.
2. We propose an uncertainty-guided label augmentation
scheme based on the graph convolutional networks to
explore more reliable labels from sparse scribble anno-
tation, which can avoid the model converging to an
undesired local minima as intra-class discontinuity.
3. To solve the problem of poor boundary localization due
to incomplete labels around shadow edges on the aug-
mented annotations, we introduce a multi-task learning
framework to train the shadow detection and edge detec-
tion jointly. It enables us to extract the shadow edge
features explicitly to produce more accurate shadow
boundaries.
Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...
2 Related work
Traditional shadow detection methods [17, 26, 65] focus on
extracting hand-crafted features from pixel and edge to iden-
tify the shadow region from consumer photographs. Later,
various machine learning-based classifiers are designed for
shadow detection based on these features. For example,
Huang et al. [17] train a support vector machine (SVM) for
shadow detection using the edge features of shadows. Guo
et al. [13] also use the SVM to create a graph-based clas-
sifier to merge the segmented shadow regions using color,
position, and texture features. Vicente et al. [45] employ
Markov random field (MRF) to improve the performance
of shadow detection using pair-wise context. However, these
above methods do not work in complex shadow images since
these hand-crafted features are not discriminative enough to
distinguish shadow regions well from backgrounds.
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
[2, 20, 32, 58] have achieved remarkable performance in
the computer vision community. At the same time, various
CNN-based shadow detection methods have been proposed
for obtaining more accurate results. In the beginning, Vicente
et al. [44, 46] propose a “lazy annotation” method to quickly
generate pseudo masks for the large-scale benchmark dataset
(i.e., SBU), and introduce a patch-level CNN to exploit
semantic information of shadow images. Nguyen et al. [35]
introduce a novel sensitive conditional generative adversar-
ial network (scGAN) to extract high-level contexts better.
Le et al. [28] propose an attenuation and detection network
(A+D Net) for adversarial learning, where the A-Net tries to
fool the shadow predictions from the D-Net by modifying
the illumination of shadow regions. Hu et al. [16] present a
direction-aware spatial context (DSC ) module that uses a
spatial RNN to learn the spatial context of shadows. Zhu et
al. [66] develop a bidirectional recurrent attention residual
(BDRAR) to optimize context features from deep to shal-
low layers. Zheng et al. [62] propose a distraction-aware
shadow detection network (DSDNet) to learn discriminative
features for robust shadow detection. Chen et al. [5] intro-
duce a multi-task mean teacher network (MTMT-Net), which
uses unlabeled shadow data to further improve the general-
ization ability. Very recently, Hu et al. [15] design a fast
shadow detection network (FSDNet) by adopting the DSC
[16] module. Zhu et al. [67] propose a feature decomposition
and reweighting scheme (FDRNet) to mitigate the intensity
bias in shadow detection. Meng et al. [33] introduce a weakly
supervised method for automatically estimating the confi-
dence of acoustic shadow regions in ultrasound images. Liu
et al. [29] present a weakly supervised convolutional neural
network architecture called DenserNet for visual localiza-
tion, which utilizes GPS-tagged image pairs for end-to-end
training without needing pixel-level annotation. Recently,
Zhu et al. [68] present a novel shadow detection frame-
work (SDCM) by investigating the mutual complementary
mechanisms. Wu et al. [52] introduce an omni-supervised
shadow detection approach based on Transformer architec-
ture (SDTR+) to generalize to new shadow datasets with
minimal annotation costs.
While deep learning-based shadow detection methods
have achieved compelling results, these above deep learning-
based shadow detectors heavily rely on pixel-level densely
labeling. This approach will become a bottleneck when
scaling up the number of images, leading to a limited gener-
alization ability of deep models. That motivates us to attempt
to develop a weakly supervised shadow detection framework.
3 Two benchmarks for weakly supervised
shadow detection
Several benchmarks have been successively proposed for
single-image shadow detection in the past years. In the begin-
ning, UCF [65] (245 pairs of images) and UIUC [13] (108
pairs of images) are created for training traditional machine
learning-based classifiers as their limited size. To meet the
needs of deep learning, Vicente et al. [46] feature a wider vari-
ety of scenes for their SBU dataset, which has 4,725 pairs of
shadow/shadow mask images. To accelerate the process of
large-scale data labeling, they first use lazy annotation [11] to
generate coarse binary masks for training images. Although
these masks will be further refined by the least squares sup-
port vector machine (LSSVM) [40], they still have lots of
annotation noises (Fig. 2a). Next, Wang et al. [47] binarize
the difference between shadow and shadow-free images to
obtain the coarse label masks. Then, they manually adjust
these masks for more accurate labeling on their ISTD dataset.
However, so many images in it share the same background,
leading to a weak generalization ability. To consider both the
complexity of image scenes and the accuracy of annotations,
Hu et al. [15] collect shadow images for multiple scenar-
ios and compile the CUHK-Shadow dataset, which contains
10,500 shadow images. They hired 30 persons to label all
shadow images, which cost about six months.
As we can see, producing a sizable shadow dataset would
demand a great deal of work, especially to get pixel-level
annotations. So we seek a weak supervisory signal, i.e.,
scribble, to annotate shadow images. Specifically, we invited
six students to annotate all images from SBU and ISTD. It
took around 4 h for data labeling and 2 h for discussion and
refinement. We also provide the statistical analysis for the
annotated pixels, which reveals that around 2% of the pixels
be labeled (Fig. 2b). Moreover, instead of randomly draw-
ing a few strokes in the shadow and non-shadow regions,
we empirically mark error-prone regions (tiny shadow, self
shadow, soft shadow, and distraction regions) with the cor-
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Annotang for SBU
Shadow image Shadow mask Scribble Shadow image
(a) Illustration of our Scr-SBU and Scr-ISTD
Fig. 2 Our weakly supervised shadow detection benchmarks
responding color. This trick ensures that the trained model is
highly discriminative for these regions.
4 Label augmentation
Let us define the training set as S = {Ii , Yi }i=1
N , where I is
the shadow image, Y is scribble mask, and N is the number
of the all training images. Considering that directly training
on the sparse annotation will lead to the deep model being
trapped into undesired local minima. In this section, we aim
to develop a label augmentation scheme to explore denser
annotation Y from given sparse scribble mask Y. Our label
augmentation consists of two degrees of schemes: weak aug-
mentation and strong augmentation, see also Fig. 3.
It is worth noting that a superpixel will be viewed as the
shadow or non-shadow region entirely as long as an arbitrary
pixel is annotated as shadow or non-shadow. In weak aug-
mentation, we can easily expand the annotation by two–three
times (the times are decided by the superpixel size). While
in strong augmentation, we further propagate the label infor-
mation from the labeled superpixel to the rest parts based on
a two-layer GCN model. Then, we perform uncertainty anal-
ysis for GCN outputs to select the most reliable part from the
entire pseudo-masks, avoiding deep model training on them
overfitting so many noisy labels.
4.1 Data Formulation
We first use SLIC superpixel segmentation [1] to separate a
training image into a series of homogeneous regions. Then,
these superpixels are viewed as nodes in graph G, allowing
us to have a better context for the representation. Noting
that, since we need to train an individual GCN model for
each shadow image in the training set, the overall training
cost and memory requirements should be considered. Hence,
we attempt to design an efficient GCN model from feature
representation and graph construction.
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H. Chen et al.
Annotang for ISTD
Shadow mask Scribble
(b) Statics of the ratio of labeled pixel
Feature representation. Shadow regions usually have
lower brightness, darker color, weaker texture, and shape
clusters. Therefore, we encode the illumination (L channel
in Lab color space), color histograms (RGB space), tex-
ton histograms [8], and location of each superpixel into
node representation. Compared with the features extracted by
deep network [60], hand-crafted features have lower dimen-
sions. Most importantly, we do not need a pre-trained image
classifier to extract high-level features for shadow images.
While the edge representation can be viewed as a relevance
between
 H two adjacent nodes, computed by Gaussian similar-
ity h=1 exp(−||fih − f hj ||22 /σh2 ), fih denote the node feature
representation of node xi on h-th hand-crafted features, and
σh is the corresponding standard deviation.
Graph construction. Even in extremely complex scenes,
the shadow regions still easily to be distinguished from the
image background by our eyes. We found that humans tend
to first locate the approximate scope of shadow regions by
the prior knowledge of weak brightness, and then discrimi-
nate the ambiguous regions by local and global comparison,
e.g., two regions on the same material with different bright-
ness indicate that the darker region must belong to shadow.
To conduct more robust label propagation, we treat all the
superpixels in turn as the center, connecting with the four
nearest nodes and 15 random nodes (these sparse connec-
tions can be a trade-off between training cost and inference
accuracy) for considering both the local and global context.
4.2 Label propagation
After our weak augmentation, we can assign each superpixel
node with a corresponding label: shadow, non-shadow, or
unlabeled. Next, we pose the strong label augmentation as
a graph-learning problem to propagate the label information
among all nodes. The procedure can be formulated as:
˜ 0 ))W1 ),
Y = Sigmoid(Ã(ReLU(ASW (1)
Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...

Fig. 3 Overview of our Scribble annotaon

uncertainty-guided label
augmentation scheme

Expand
Hidden layers Output
Graph formulaon MCDO
Hidden layers layers

2-layered GCN

Strong augmentaon
T

Weak augmentaon

where S = [s1 , s2 , ..., sn ]T ∈ Rn×d consists of n feature reliable non-shadow, and unreliable node). Inspired by the
vectors with d dimension, W0 ∈ Rd×32 and W1 ∈ R32×1 Monte Carlo dropout (MCDO) [18, 22], which can perform
are network parameters, Ã is the sum of the adjacent matrix uncertainty analysis for an arbitrary CNN model by keeping
A ∈ Rn×n and an identity matrix in . Y = [y1 , y2 , ..., yn ] the dropout layers turned on in the inference stage. Consider-
denotes the predicted probabilities of all nodes. The GCN ing the similarity between the CNN and GCN, we introduce
training and inference process is very fast as it only has a this MCDO into the GCN training to conduct such analy-
few thousand parameters. Then, we introduce a partial cross- sis. The identified uncertain parts will be regarded as the
entropy loss [42] to encourage the label information from the “unreliable nodes,” and then be discarded in the subsequent
weak augmentation unchanged in the training stage: multi-task learning. Specifically, we retain the dropout layer
in the inference stage and then perform T forward passes to
⎡ ⎤
  generate a distribution over predictions.
1 1
LGC N = −⎣ log ŷi + log(1 − ŷ j )⎦ ,
|S| |N S|
1 
T
i∈S j∈N S
D(x) ≈ GC N (x, θ t ), (3)
(2) T
t=1

where S and N S denote the set of shadow and non-shadow
nodes in the result of weak augmentation, respectively. In the
stage of inference, we can calculate the predicted probabili-
ties for all nodes by Eq. (1) and then generate a corresponding
shadow map (Fig. 4b). Specifically, we construct a fully con-
nected graph including all nodes in a shadow image, extract
the feature matrix, and then feed it into the well-trained GCN
model.
4.3 Noise suppression
One can observe that there are many errors (Fig. 4e) in GCN
outputs as the limited performance of the lightweight GCN
model and the limited representation ability of low-level fea-
tures. According to the memorization effect [59], training
with partially incorrect labels often reduces the final model
performance. As a result, our goal is to identify the most
reliable parts from GCN outputs.
Our idea is to transfer the label propagation from a binary
classification problem (i.e., shadow and non-shadow node)
into a multi-classification problem (i.e., reliable shadow,
where θ is the GCN’s parameter and T is number of total
stochastic forward passes. We compute a node’s uncertainty
U(x) by the cross-entropy:

U(x) = − D(x) log D(x) + (1 − D(x)) log(1 − D(x)) .
(4)
At this point, the unreliable part can be selected if U(x) is
greater than the threshold τ . The final augmented annotation
mask can be formulated as:
binarize(Y (x)), i f U(x) > τ
Y (x) = , (5)
2, i f U(x) ≤ τ
where “2” denotes the uncertain elements (black in Fig. 4c),
which will be discarded in the rest of the shadow detection
training. One can observe from that (Fig. 4e and f, we can
obtain a reliable pseudo-mask with fewer label noises. Here,
it is worth noting that, despite using our label augmenta-
tion scheme, there still are three kinds of supervision signals.
That means training with the pseudo-masks from our weak

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Fig. 4 An example of our noise

suppression

(a) Shadow image (b) Pseudo shadow mask (c) Result of noise suppression

(d) Clean shadow mask (e) Noisy labels in (b) (f ) Noisy labels in (c)

or strong label augmentation is still essentially weakly super-
vised learning.
5.2 Multi-task learning
Shadow detection task: For scribble supervision, we use
the partial cross-entropy loss Lscribble on the labeled points
of augmented annotations as:

1  1 
5 Edge-guided shadow detection Lscribble = − log ŷi − log(1 − ŷi ),
|As | |Ans |
i∈As j∈Ans
Despite the denser annotation obtained from the strong aug- (6)
mentation, they still had to represent the structure of shadows
since the uncertainty parts tend to exist along with the shadow
where As and Ans denote the augmented shadow and
boundaries. Hence, we introduce the edge detection task
non-shadow annotations, respectively. ŷi is the predicted
into our weakly supervised shadow detection framework, as
probability of i-th pixel belong to shadow.
shown in Fig. 5. Specifically, our shadow detection branch
first generates a coarse shadow map sc ; the edge map e Edge detection task: We use the SOTA edge detector,
obtained by the edge detection branch will be fused further EDETR [39], to produce edge maps e for all training images,
to improve the structure of sc , and then produce a refined then use them as GT to train the edge detection branch with
shadow map sr . Finally, we introduce a gated structure-aware a loss Ledge :
loss [61] to force the boundaries of these two shadow maps
to comply with image edges. 
N
Ledge (e, e ) = − (ei log ei + (1 − ei ) log(1 − ei )). (7)
i=1

This task can compensate for the weak boundary structure in

5.1 Network architecture augmented annotations.

Unlike recent SOTA shadow detectors [5, 62, 66, 67], which
use ResNext101 [56] or EfficentNet [41] to extract multi-
scale features of shadow images, we use the SegNeXt-B [12]
instead as our backbone, which can perform better than recent
vision transformers (ViT) [31, 55, 63] with simple and cheap
convolutions. For the feature maps extracted from the dif-
ferent stages of the shared encoder, we first compress and
upsample them into the same resolution, and then fuse and
feed them into a 1 × 1 convolutional kernel to generate the
edge map and shadow map for two different tasks separately.
Gated structure-aware loss: Although the edge features
from the edge detection task help the shadow detection net-
work generate a shadow map with richer structures, it does
not limit the scope of the structure that needs to be recov-
ered. For example, it retains too much structural information
in non-shadow regions. Inspired by the gated structure-aware
loss [61], which introduces a gate for the smoothing loss [48]
to place constraints on the scope of structure to be recovered,
we employ it to encourage the predicted shadow maps to have
consistent intensities inside the shadow regions and distinct

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Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...
Fig. 5 Overview of our
proposed weakly supervised
shadow detection framework. It
consists of three main parts: a
shared encoder for extracting
features from shadow images,
and two decoders for edge
detection and shadow detection,
respectively
boundaries at the shadow edges. This loss is defined as:
 
Lgate = φ(|∂ p sw,h |e−α|∂ p (G·Iw,h )| ),
w,h p∈
x ,y
where φ(·) is square root operation, Iw,h is the intensity of
the gray level at location (w, h), p is the partial derivatives,
and G is the gate. As shown in Fig. 6, we dilate the predicted
shadow map (Fig. 6c) to obtain a gate map (Fig. 6d). By using
it, gated edge detection result (Fig. 6e) can help network to
focus on the shadow region and predict sharp boundaries in
a shadow map.
Based on these above loss functions, we define the total
loss function LMulti−task as follows:
LMulti−task = Lscribble (sc ) + Lscribble (sr ) + α1 · Lgate (sc )
+ α2 · Lgate (sr ) + α3 · Ledge (e, e ).
where α1 , α2 , and α3 are the hyper-parameters for balancing
the effect of each loss function. We use the Lscirbble and Lgate
on both the coarse shadow map sc and the refined shadow
map sr , and employ the Ledge for the edge map e . Note that
Lscribble do not contradict with Lgate since Lscribble aims to
propagate the annotated labels to the shadow regions (relying
on the shadow detection branch), while Lgate constrain sc and
sr to be well aligned to edges extracted by edge detection
branch prevents the shadow labels from propagating to non-
shadow regions.
6 Experiments
6.1 Setup
Benchmarks. All experiments in our work are conducted on
the following datasets: Scr-SBU, Scr-ISTD, and UCF [65].
Specifically, we first train and test our WSD on the Scr-SBU
and Scr-ISTD dataset separately. Next, due to the limited size
of UCF dataset and the image scenes on it are similar to SBU,
we also validate the detection performance on it by using a
(8) model well-trained on Scr-SBU.
Metrics. We use the balanced error rate (BER) to evaluate
our proposed detector quantitatively:
1 TP TN
BER = 1 − + × 100. (10)
2 TP + FN TN + FP
We also consider the per-pixel error rates of shadow and non-
shadow regions, denoted as “S” and “NS,” respectively.
Methods for comparison. We first compare our methods
with recent ten SOTA shadow detectors, SDTR+ [52], SDCM
[68], FDRNet [67], MTMT-Net [5], DSD [62], A+D Net [28],
DSC [16], BDRAR [66], scGAN [35], and stacked-CNN
(9) [46]. For a more comprehensive comparison, we also com-
pare our method with a weakly supervised saliency object
detector, WSOD [57], and a weakly supervised camouflaged
object detector, WCOD [14]. For a fair competition, we
directly use the reported evaluation values on their publi-
cations.
6.2 Implementation details
Our GCN model and shadow detection network are imple-
mented on NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU by Python 3.6 and
Pytorch 1.7. In details, our two-layered GCN model has 32
hidden layers and an output layer for binary classification.
We use Adam as our gradient optimizer, the learning rate
is set as 0.01 to train all graphs from a single image with
600 epochs. In our uncertainty analysis (Sec. 4.3), we set
the dropout rate in the hidden layer p = 0.3, T = 20, and
τ = 0.8. In our shadow detection network, we first resize
all input images to 416×416. The learning rate is set as 1e-4
with a poly-learning rate decay policy. The batch size is set
as 8, and the hyper-parameters α1 , α2 , and α3 in Eq. (9) as
0.2, 0.2, and 0.6, respectively. During testing, we also apply
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(a) Input (b) Edge map (c) Shadow map
Fig. 6 Structure-aware constrains
the CRF [25] to further refine the predicted shadow maps like
pervious works [5, 62, 67].
6.3 Comparison with SOTA methods
One can observe from Table 1, our fully supervised shadow
detector (i.e., Ours-F) can achieve the best BER values among
all competitors on the SBU, UCF, and ISTD datasets. Com-
pared to the second-best fully supervised methods, Ours-F
reduces the BER values by 6.46%, 2.20%, and 3.47% on
SBU, UCF, and ISTD, respectively. Moreover, the perfor-
mance of Our-W (i.e., WSD) also outperforms these weakly
supervised methods, which improves by 9.35%, 8.78%,
8.44%, and 13.32% in terms of BER on SBU, UCF, ISTD
datasets, respectively. In addition, we also provide the
computational complexity (i.e., FLOPs) and the network
parameters of all competitive methods. Due to the usage
of SegNeXt-B as our network backbone, such lightweight
design cannot introduce so many training parameters and
computational complexity.
Recall that the shadow scenes in SBU dataset are more
diverse and complex, and there are a lot of noisy labels
in the SBU training set. Training with them is prone to
meet performance bottlenecks. However, in this work, we
use scribbles to mark error-prone regions empirically, and
then develop the label augmentation scheme to obtain denser
annotations. Moreover, the edge detection-guided multi-task
learning framework can lead the prediction align with shadow
boundaries. So we can outperform existing fully supervised
and semi-supervised methods on the SBU and ISTD dataset
by a little margin. While in the UCF dataset, our detector
does not show a clear superiority than SDTR+, due to this
method learn from more auxiliary training data for better
generalizability.
As shown in Fig. 7, we also qualitatively compare our
shadow detector with the most recent SOTA methods. One
can see that our detector has the best visualization per-
formance among all competitors on various scenes. When
coping with tiny shadow (e.g., first two rows), self shadow
(e.g., 3th and 4th rows), soft shadow (e.g., 5th rows), and
common cast shadow (e.g., the last three rows), our method
detects them more accurately with fine structures.
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H. Chen et al.
(d) Gated shadow (e) Gated edge map
map
6.4 Ablation study and analysis
As shown in Table 2 and Fig. 8, we conduct extensive experi-
ments to analyze our methods, including label augmentation
scheme (“V2 ” and “V3 ”), multi-task learning (“V4 ”), loss
function (“V5 ” and “V6 ”), and robustness analysis (“V7 ” and
“V8 ”). In this paper, “V6 ” denotes our final result.
Directly training on scribbles. We directly train the shadow
detection branch in Fig. 5 with the sparse scribble annotation
and Eq. (6), denoted as “V1 .” One can observe that “V1 ”
cannot preserve the shadow structure well caused by the intra-
class discontinuity from the sparse scribble.
Effect of label augmentation. We use the pseudo-masks
from our weak augmentation and strong augmentation
scheme to train the shadow detection branch like “V1 ,”
denoted as “V2 ” and “V3 .” Compared with the original scrib-
ble annotation, one can observe that both of our proposed
label augmentation schemes can lead to different degrees of
performance improvement. Among them, the effect of strong
augmentation is more remarkable. By only learning the
most reliable training samples identified by our strong aug-
mentation scheme, our weakly supervised shadow detection
method already achieves similar performance with SOTA
approaches.
Effect of the multi-task learning. We add the edge detection
task to “V3 ,” denoted as “V4 .” Compared to “V3 ,” we observe
from Fig. 8f, the edge detection branch can provide richer
structural constraints for shadow detection.
Effect of gated structure-aware loss. We use auxiliary
smoothing loss [48] and gated structure-aware loss [61] to
train “V4 ,” denoted as “V5 ” and “V6 ,” respectively. One
can observe from Fig. 8g, simply using the smoothing loss
enforces smoothness in the whole image will make the
shadow map ambiguous. While the gated structure-aware
loss in “V6 ” can tackle this issue.
Effect of different edge maps. We also use other edge detec-
tion methods, i.e., RCF [30] or Sobel [24], to extract the edge
maps for shadow images, and then use them for training the
edge detection network, which is denoted as “V7 ” and “V8 ,”
respectively. Since the Sobel and RCF are more sensitive to
 Table 1 Quantitative comparisons of shadow detection methods on three benchmark datasets
Method Year Type Params (M) FLOPs (G) SBU [46] UCF [65] ISTD [47]
BER ↓ S↓ NS ↓ BER S NS BER S NS
Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...

stacked-CNN [46] 2016 F 11.00 8.84 12.76 13.00 8.84 12.76 8.60 7.69 9.23
scGAN [35] 2017 – – 9.10 8.39 9.69 11.50 7.74 15.30 4.70 3.22 6.18
BDRAR [66] 2018 42.46 31.42 3.64 3.40 3.89 7.81 9.69 5.44 2.69 0.50 4.87
DSC [16] 2018 122.48 61.66 5.59 9.76 1.42 10.54 18.08 3.00 3.42 3.85 3.00
A+D Net [28] 2018 54.41 – 5.37 4.45 6.30 9.25 8.37 10.14 – – –
DSD [62] 2019 58.16 46.63 3.45 3.33 3.58 7.59 9.74 5.44 2.17 1.36 2.98
MTMT-Net [5] 2020 44.13 47.34 3.15 3.73 2.57 7.47 10.31 4.63 1.72 1.36 2.08
FDRNet [67] 2021 10.77 14.32 3.04 2.91 3.18 7.28 8.31 6.26 1.55 1.22 1.88
SDCM [68] 2022 10.95 15.04 2.94 – – 6.73 – – 1.44 – –
SDTR+ [52] 2023 24.82 35.17 2.95 3.15 2.75 6.35 6.73 5.97 1.55 1.18 1.84
Ours-F 34.81 24.32 2.76 (6.46%↑) 3.04 2.48 6.21 (2.20%↑) 6.58 5.84 1.39 (3.47% ↑) 1.06 1.72
Ours-W (WSD) W 2.81 (9.35% ↑) 2.79 2.83 6.65(8.78% ↑) 7.65 5.65 1.41(8.44% ↑) 1.22 1.87
WCOD [14] 2023 29.52 13.46 3.10 3.08 3.12 7.29 8.12 6.46 1.54 1.36 1.72
WSOD [57] 2023 48.07 26.17 3.23 3.22 3.24 7.46 8.25 6.67 1.77 1.53 2.01
“F” and “W” denote the fully and weakly supervised training type, respectively. We set the best two fully supervised detectors in red and blue color, while the best two weakly supervised detectors
are set in green and copper. We also provide the percentage improvement bold for our two detectors compared to the best one in the previous detectors

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 H. Chen et al.

(a) Inputs (b) A+D (c) DSC (d) (e) DSD (f ) MTMT(g) Seg- (h) Ours (i) GT
BDRAR NeXt

Fig. 7 Qualitative comparison of our method with the SOTAs

Table 2 Ablation study on three

Metric V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8
benchmark datasets
SBU [46] BER 12.5 11.30 6.13 4.20 3.82 2.81 3.02 3.41
Shadow 9.63 8.57 5.31 3.58 3.33 2.79 2.83 2.98
Non-shadow 15.37 14.03 6.95 4.82 4.31 2.83 3.21 3.84
UCF [65] BER 15.30 13.10 9.58 7.55 7.49 6.65 6.72 7.21
Shadow 10.32 10.12 9.32 9.14 8.69 7.65 7.71 8.20
Non-shadow 20.28 16.08 9.84 5.96 6.29 5.65 5.73 6.22
ISTD [47] BER 9.24 8.65 3.57 2.30 1.86 1.41 1.59 1.70
Shadow 7.51 7.32 2.17 1.98 1.62 1.22 1.27 1.44
Non-shadow 10.97 9.98 4.97 2.62 2.10 1.87 1.91 1.96
We set the best and second one of all among detectors in red and blue, respectively

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Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...

(a) Input (b) GT (c) V1 (d) V2 (e) V3 (f ) V4 (g) V5 (h) V6 (WSD) (i) V7 (j) V8

Fig. 8 Visual comparison for different combinations

(a) Skin image (b) Ground truth (c) Our scribble annota- (d) Edge map
tion

(e) Superpixel segmenta-(f ) Weak label augmenta-(g) Strong label augmen- (h) Lesion mask
tion tion tation

Fig. 9 Application in skin lesion segmentation

(a) Shadow image (b) Ground truth (c) Edge map (d) Shadow mask

Fig. 10 Failure case from our WSD

image noise or texture than EDETR, “V7 ” and “V8 ” are lower was expected, we obtained impressive skin lesion detection
than “V6 .” results by training our weakly supervised learning frame-
work.
6.5 Application

We can also apply our weakly supervised framework to

semantic segmentation, salient object detection, and medi-
cal image segmentation. In the task of skin lesion detection,
for example, we first relabel ISIC dataset [6] with scribble
annotation (Fig. 9c). It only took six students about 15 min to
annotate 2000 images in the ISIC dataset. Then, we employ
EDETR [39] to generate edge maps for all training sam-
ples (Fig. 9d). Next, we conduct weak label augmentation
(Fig. 9f) and strong label augmentation (Fig. 9g) succes-
sively to obtain more pixel-level training samples. Since the
scenes of skin lesion images are simpler than the natural
image, the superpixel size can be set bigger than our shadow
image, and the scribble can also be drawn more optionally. As
6.6 Limitation
We must acknowledge that although we can obtain satis-
factory shadow detection results, our proposed methods also
suffer from several limitations: (1) Despite the well-designed
hand-crafted features and graph construction, the training and
inference of GCNs for all training samples still bring about
2.2 and 0.5 h for the SBU and ISTD datasets, respectively.
(2) Inaccurate edge detection result (Fig. 10c) may reduce
the accuracy of shadow detection (Fig. 10d), especially in
unclear shadow regions.

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7 Conclusions
In this work, we create two shadow detection datasets with
scribble annotations, i.e., Scr-SBU and Scr-ISTD. At the
same time, we present a corresponding weakly supervised
shadow detection framework. Our method can achieve a
good trade-off between the labeling cost and detection accu-
racy. Specifically, an uncertainty-guided label augmentation
scheme is developed to expand the sparse scribble annotation
to more reliable regions and enable sufficient training for a
deep model. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-task learn-
ing framework to produce shadow maps with rich structures.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outper-
forms existing SOTA semi-supervised and fully supervised
methods. In the future, we will extend our methods, e.g., label
augmentation or edge-guided multi-task learning framework
to more computer vision tasks ,i.e., semantic segmentation
and salient object detection.
Author contributions WW was involved in conceptualization, writing—
original draft, writing—review & editing. HC helped in validation,
methodology, project administration, funding acquisition. X-DC con-
tributed to visualization, formal analysis, data curation. WY and XM
helped in supervision.
Funding The work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (61972120), the General Research Project of
Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education (Y202044861), the Zhe-
jiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Regional Innovation Joint
Funds) (LQZSZ24E050001).
Data availability The datasets generated during and/or analyzed dur-
ing the current study are available from the corresponding author on
reasonable request.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest.
Ethics approval The work follows appropriate ethical standards in
conducting research and writing the manuscript. This work presents
computational models trained with publicly available data, for which
no ethical approval was required.
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Aksu, China. His research inter-
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to juris- ests include deep learning and computer vision.
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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds

exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the
author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted Wenya Yang received her B.Sc.
manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such degree from Zhengzhou Univer-
publishing agreement and applicable law. sity of Aeronautics in 2017, M.Sc.
degree from Zhengzhou Univer-
sity of Light Industry in 2020,
and PH.D. degree from Hangzhou
Dianzi University in 2023. She
Hongyu Chen received his B.Sc.
is currently a postdoctoral fellow
degree from Jilin Medical Uni-
with the School of Electronic
versity in 2018 and M.Sc. degree
Information Engineering,
from Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou Dianzi University. Her
in 2021. He is currently pursuing
research interests include computer
a Ph.D. degree in computer sci-
vision, artificial intelligence, med-
ence and technology at Hangzhou
ical image processing, and com-
Dianzi University. His research
puter graphics.
areas include computer vision,
artificial intelligence, computer
graphics, and computer-aided
design.

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Annotate less but perform better: weakly supervised...

Xiaoyang Mao received her B.Sc.

in computer science from Fudan
University, China, M.Sc., and
Ph.D. in computer science from
University of Tokyo, Japan. She
is currently a professor at Depart-
ment of Computer Science and
Engineering, University of
Yamanashi, Japan, and an adjunct
professor at School of Computer
Science and Technology, Hangzhou
Dianzi University, China. Her
research interests include image
processing, virtual and augmented
reality, and their applications to e-
health. She is the receipt of Computer Graphics International 2018
Achievement Award. She is a member of ACM and IEEE and is serv-
ing as an associate editor for the Visual Computer.

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