  Shadow detection is a fundamental and challenging task, since it requires an
understanding of global image semantics and there are various backgrounds
around shadows. This paper presents a novel network for shadow detection by
analyzing image context in a direction-aware manner. To achieve this, we first
formulate the direction-aware attention mechanism in a spatial recurrent neural
network (RNN) by introducing attention weights when aggregating spatial context
features in the RNN. By learning these weights through training, we can recover
direction-aware spatial context (DSC) for detecting shadows. This design is
developed into the DSC module and embedded in a CNN to learn DSC features at
different levels. Moreover, a weighted cross entropy loss is designed to make
the training more effective. We employ two common shadow detection benchmark
datasets and perform various experiments to evaluate our network. Experimental
results show that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves
97% accuracy and 38% reduction on balance error rate.
