# DiffCR: A Fast Conditional Diffusion Framework for Cloud Removal from Optical Satellite Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04417 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04417/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 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 61 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 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 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Diffusion Models Meet Remote Sensing: Principles, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08926/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Enhancement for Cloud Removal in Ultra-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15105/) (2024)
- [Effective Cloud Removal for Remote Sensing Images by an Improved Mean-Reverting Denoising Model with Elucidated Design Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23717/) (2025)
- [Can Generative Geospatial Diffusion Models Excel as Discriminative Geospatial Foundation Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07890/) (2025)
- [AllClear: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Cloud Removal in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23891/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Dictionary Learning for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06683/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Diffusion Bridge with Attention-Based SAR Fusion for Satellite Image Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03607/) (2025)
- [COP-GEN-Beta: Unified Generative Modelling of COPernicus Imagery Thumbnails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08548/) (2025)
- [PanBench: Towards High-Resolution and High-Performance Pansharpening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12083/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Transfer and Domain Adaptation for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06664/) (2024)
- [SAR-to-RGB Translation with Latent Diffusion for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11154/) (2025)
- [SADER: Structure-Aware Diffusion Framework with DEterministic Resampling for Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00536/) (2026)
- [COP-GEN: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Copernicus Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03239/) (2026)
- [Remote Sensing Image Dehazing: A Systematic Review of Progress, Challenges, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20289/) (2026)
- [AnyBand-Diff: A Unified Remote Sensing Image Generation and Band Repair Framework with Spectral Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14341/) (2026)
- [Interpretation-Oriented Cloud Removal via Observation-Anchored Residual Flow with Geo-Contextual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02471/) (2026)
- [ARFA: An Asymmetric Receptive Field Autoencoder Model for Spatiotemporal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00314/) (2023)
- [A Parallel Attention Network for Cattle Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19980/) (2024)
- [UDHF2-Net: Uncertainty-diffusion-model-based High-Frequency TransFormer Network for Remotely Sensed Imagery Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16129/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Fusion of Local and Global Visual Features with Mixture-of-Experts for Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27155/) (2025)
- [UrbanDIFF: A Denoising Diffusion Model for Spatial Gap Filling of Urban Land Surface Temperature Under Dense Cloud Cover](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17782/) (2025)
- [Multi-Perspective Subimage CLIP with Keyword Guidance for Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18190/) (2026)
- [Geometric Knowledge-Assisted Federated Dual Knowledge Distillation Approach Towards Remote Sensing Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07774/) (2026)
- [D2-CDIG: Controlled Diffusion Remote Sensing Image Generation with Dual Priors of DEM and Cloud-Fog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14326/) (2026)
- [IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09347/) (2026)
- [GeoCR: Learning a Generalist Cloud Removal Prior from Heterogeneous Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32510/) (2026)
- [EORestore-Agent: Fidelity-Guided Agentic Restoration of Remote Sensing Images with Composite Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06196/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical satellite images are a critical data source; however, cloud cover often compromises their quality, hindering image applications and analysis. Consequently, effectively removing clouds from optical satellite images has emerged as a prominent research direction. While recent advancements in cloud removal primarily rely on generative adversarial networks, which may yield suboptimal image quality, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse image-generation tasks, showcasing their potential in addressing this challenge. This paper presents a novel framework called DiffCR, which leverages conditional guided diffusion with deep convolutional networks for high-performance cloud removal for optical satellite imagery. Specifically, we introduce a decoupled encoder for conditional image feature extraction, providing a robust color representation to ensure the close similarity of appearance information between the conditional input and the synthesized output. Moreover, we propose a novel and efficient time and condition fusion block within the cloud removal model to accurately simulate the correspondence between the appearance in the conditional image and the target image at a low computational cost. Extensive experimental evaluations on two commonly used benchmark datasets demonstrate that DiffCR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on all metrics, with parameter and computational complexities amounting to only 5.1% and 5.4%, respectively, of those previous best methods. The source code, pre-trained models, and all the experimental results will be publicly available at https://github.com/XavierJiezou/DiffCR upon the paper's acceptance of this work.