Shadow Illuminator is an image processing software that intelligently compensates for illumination problems in digital pictures. The Shadow Illuminator has been developed at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University to enable machines to approach visual capabilities of human eye. Users will find that the results of Shadow Illuminator resemble what theirs eyes would see if they viewed the environment instead of a camera.

From the original image the software estimates the illumination field that illuminated the scene when the picture was taken. Then it corrects every pixel to produce a result that would have been seen if the scene was uniformly illuminated. The algorithm is intelligent in that it automatically "finds" where shadows start and stop just by "looking" at the original picture. By knowing where the shadow boundaries are, Shadow Illuminator produced results free of a highly objectionable artifact known as "halo" artifact.