We consider \emph{Alternating Direction Implicit} (ADI) splitting schemes to
compute efficiently the numerical solution of the PDE osmosis model considered
by Weickert et al. for several imaging applications. The discretised scheme is
shown to preserve analogous properties to the continuous model. The dimensional
splitting strategy traduces numerically into the solution of simple tridiagonal
systems for which standard matrix factorisation techniques can be used to
improve upon the performance of classical implicit methods, even for large time
steps. Applications to the shadow removal problem are presented