Saleh, Alzayat, Olsen, Alex, Wood, Jake, Philippa, Bronson, and Rahimi Azghadi, Mostafa (2025) FieldNet: Efficient real-time shadow removal for enhanced vision in field robotics. Expert Systems with Applications, 279. 127442.

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Abstract

Shadows significantly hinder computer vision tasks in outdoor environments, particularly in field robotics, where varying lighting conditions complicate object detection and localization. We present FieldNet, a novel deep learning framework for real-time shadow removal, optimized for resource-constrained hardware. FieldNet introduces a probabilistic enhancement module and a novel loss function to address challenges of inconsistent shadow boundary supervision and artefact generation, achieving enhanced accuracy and simplicity without requiring shadow masks during inference. Trained on a dataset of 10,000 natural images augmented with synthetic shadows, FieldNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets (ISTD, ISTD+, SRD), with up to 9x speed improvements (66 FPS on Nvidia 2080Ti) and superior shadow removal quality (PSNR: 38.67, SSIM: 0.991). Real-world case studies in precision agriculture robotics demonstrate the practical impact of FieldNet in enhancing weed detection accuracy. These advancements establish FieldNet as a robust, efficient solution for real-time vision tasks in field robotics and beyond.

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