Shadow detection and removal is an important task for digitized document applications. It is hard for many methods to distinguish shadow from printed text due to the high darkness similarity. In this paper, we propose a local water-filling method to remove shadows by mapping a document image into a structure of topographic surface. Firstly, we design a local water-filling approach including a flooding and effusing process to estimate the shading map, which can be used to detect umbra and penumbra. Then, the umbra is enhanced using Retinex Theory. For penumbra, we propose a binarized water-filling strategy to correct illumination distortions. Moreover, we build up a dataset called optical shadow removal (OSR dataset), which includes hundreds of shadow images. Experiments performed on OSR dataset show that our method achieves an average Error Ratio of 0.685 with a computation time of 0.265 s to process an image size of 960 × 544 pixels on a desktop. The proposed method can remove the shading artifacts and outperform some state-of-the-art methods, especially for the removal of shadow boundaries.