# DiffUCD:Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Change Detection with Semantic Correlation Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12410/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Maximum Likelihood Training of Score-Based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09258/) (2021)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12072/) (2021)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [MedSegDiff: Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00611/) (2022)
- [DiffusionInst: Diffusion Model for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02773/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Deep Slow Feature Analysis for Change Detection in Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00645/) (2018)
- [Semantic Diffusion Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02057/) (2023)
- [Binary Change Guided Hyperspectral Multiclass Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04493/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Diffusion Models Meet Remote Sensing: Principles, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08926/) (2024)
- [Can Generative Geospatial Diffusion Models Excel as Discriminative Geospatial Foundation Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07890/) (2025)
- [VectorSynth: Fine-Grained Satellite Image Synthesis with Structured Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07744/) (2025)
- [TerraDiT-Omega: Unified Spatial Control for Satellite Image Synthesis with Any Geospatial Primitive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31029/) (2026)
- [SCL: Towards Domain Generalization via Single-Temporal Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11326/) (2024)
- [Balanced Diffusion-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Remote Sensing Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23310/) (2025)
- [COP-GEN: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Copernicus Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03239/) (2026)
- [AnyBand-Diff: A Unified Remote Sensing Image Generation and Band Repair Framework with Spectral Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14341/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hyperspectral image change detection (HSI-CD) has emerged as a crucial research area in remote sensing due to its ability to detect subtle changes on the earth's surface. Recently, diffusional denoising probabilistic models (DDPM) have demonstrated remarkable performance in the generative domain. Apart from their image generation capability, the denoising process in diffusion models can comprehensively account for the semantic correlation of spectral-spatial features in HSI, resulting in the retrieval of semantically relevant features in the original image. In this work, we extend the diffusion model's application to the HSI-CD field and propose a novel unsupervised HSI-CD with semantic correlation diffusion model (DiffUCD). Specifically, the semantic correlation diffusion model (SCDM) leverages abundant unlabeled samples and fully accounts for the semantic correlation of spectral-spatial features, which mitigates pseudo change between multi-temporal images arising from inconsistent imaging conditions. Besides, objects with the same semantic concept at the same spatial location may exhibit inconsistent spectral signatures at different times, resulting in pseudo change. To address this problem, we propose a cross-temporal contrastive learning (CTCL) mechanism that aligns the spectral feature representations of unchanged samples. By doing so, the spectral difference invariant features caused by environmental changes can be obtained. Experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods in terms of Overall Accuracy (OA), Kappa Coefficient (KC), and F1 scores, achieving improvements of approximately 3.95%, 8.13%, and 4.45%, respectively. Notably, our method can achieve comparable results to those fully supervised methods requiring numerous annotated samples.