ShadowCast: On-the-Fly Context-Aware Shadow Augmentation for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

Abstract

Shadows cast by elevated objects alter the spectral appearance and obscure the boundaries of objects in remote sensing images, thereby degrading semantic segmentation performance. Most existing approaches handle shadows as degradations to be detected and removed, requiring additional costs from dedicated networks and shadow-specific annotations. We propose ShadowCast, which takes the opposite approach: it synthesizes shadows and injects them during training for remote sensing segmentation. It extracts masks of elevated objects, such as buildings and trees, directly from the segmentation labels and estimates an image-specific cast-shadow direction cue by probing the brightness around them. It then projects synthetic shadows along the inferred cast-shadow direction, requiring no learned network and no acquisition metadata. Experiments on three widely used remote sensing benchmarks, Vaihingen, Potsdam, and LoveDA, show that ShadowCast consistently outperforms the baseline across diverse state-of-the-art segmentation architectures. Moreover, it brings additional performance gains when combined with standard augmentation and regularization techniques, indicating that stochastic shadow injection serves as a simple and complementary augmentation strategy for remote sensing segmentation.