Patent ID: 8295606

Claim:
A device for detecting a shadow region in an image comprising: an imaging module configured to generate a first multi-channel image including a brightness channel, a red channel, a green channel, and a blue channel; a brightness correcting module configured to correct values of the brightness channel of the first multi-channel image based on imaging parameters utilized in the imaging module, and to output the corrected first multi-channel image as a second multi-channel image; a scene classifying module configured to determine whether a shadow detection is to be carried out on the second multi-channel image based on a characteristic value computed based on the second multi-channel image; a shadow detecting module configured to classify each pixel of the second multi-channel image on which it is determined that the shadow detection is to be carried out by the scene classifying module into a shadow pixel or a non-shadow pixel, and to generate a first shadow classification mark matrix in which each pixel has a shadow classification mark value corresponding to the classification of the shadow and non-shadow pixel; a region segmentation module configured to segment the first multi-channel image generated by the imaging module into a plurality of regions each having a set of pixels having similar color values, and to generate a region mark matrix in which each pixel has a region mark value corresponding to the region and the pixels belonging to the same region have the same region mark value; and a post-processing module configured to update the first shadow classification mark matrix based on the first shadow classification mark matrix generated from the shadow detecting module and the region mark matrix output from the region segmentation module, and to output the updated first shadow classification mark matrix as a second shadow classification mark matrix.