Techniques are disclosed for generating a shadow map of a digital image. In some examples, a method may include generating a shadow mask of a digital image, generating a dilated de-noised binarized gradient image based on the shadow mask, generating a binarized median-filtered gray image based on the digital image and the dilated de-noised binarized gradient image, and generating a shadow map based on the shadow mask and the binarized median-filtered gray image. The generated shadow map can then be used to remove shadows from the digital image without degrading the quality of the image content in the digital image.