mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Diffusion Models Meet Remote Sensing: Principles, Methods, and Perspectives

arXiv 2404.08926 ↗First posted 13 Apr 2024cs.CVcited by 27

On the map: Diffusion models → Inverse problems and image restoration

Abstract (arXiv)

As a newly emerging advance in deep generative models, diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, and molecule design. The remote sensing (RS) community has also noticed the powerful ability of diffusion models and quickly applied them to a variety of tasks for image processing. Given the rapid increase in research on diffusion models in the field of RS, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive review of existing diffusion model-based RS papers, to help researchers recognize the potential of diffusion models and provide some directions for further exploration. Specifically, this article first introduces the theoretical background of diffusion models, and then systematically reviews the applications of diffusion models in RS, including image generation, enhancement, and interpretation. Finally, the limitations of existing RS diffusion models and worthy research directions for further exploration are discussed and summarized.

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 157 of its 266 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2024.

Builds on

157 of 266 references.

Closest ancestors · 31

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024DiffDet4SAR: Diffusion-based Aircraft Target Detection Network for SAR Images4 Apr
  2. 2024Building Bridges across Spatial and Temporal Resolutions: Reference-Based Super-Resolution via Change Priors and Conditional Diffusion Model26 Mar
  3. 2024SatSynth: Augmenting Image-Mask Pairs through Diffusion Models for Aerial Semantic Segmentation25 Mar
  4. 2024IDF-CR: Iterative Diffusion Process for Divide-and-Conquer Cloud Removal in Remote-sensing Images18 Mar
  5. 2024CRS-Diff: Controllable Remote Sensing Image Generation with Diffusion Model18 Mar
  6. 2024HIR-Diff: Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Restoration Via Improved Diffusion Models24 Feb
  7. 2024Siamese Meets Diffusion Network: SMDNet for Enhanced Change Detection in High-Resolution RS Imagery17 Jan
  8. 2024SAR Despeckling via Regional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model6 Jan
  9. 2024Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Survey1 Jan
  10. 2023DiffusionSat: A Generative Foundation Model for Satellite Imagery6 Dec
  11. 2023Non-Visible Light Data Synthesis and Application: A Case Study for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery29 Nov
  12. 2023TDiffDe: A Truncated Diffusion Model for Remote Sensing Hyperspectral Image Denoising22 Nov
19 more
  1. 2023FedDiff: Diffusion Model Driven Federated Learning for Multi-Modal and Multi-Clients16 Nov
  2. 2023Diffusion Models for Earth Observation Use-cases: from cloud removal to urban change detection10 Nov
  3. 2023EDiffSR: An Efficient Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution30 Oct
  4. 2023SatDM: Synthesizing Realistic Satellite Image with Semantic Layout Conditioning using Diffusion Models28 Sep
  5. 2023RSDiff: Remote Sensing Image Generation from Text Using Diffusion Model3 Sep
  6. 2023Diffusion Models for Interferometric Satellite Aperture Radar31 Aug
  7. 2023Generate Your Own Scotland: Satellite Image Generation Conditioned on Maps31 Aug
  8. 2023Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey18 Aug
  9. 2023DiffCR: A Fast Conditional Diffusion Framework for Cloud Removal from Optical Satellite Images8 Aug
  10. 2023ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting23 Jul
  11. 2023BSDM: Background Suppression Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection19 Jul
  12. 2023Hyperspectral and Multispectral Image Fusion Using the Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model7 Jul
  13. 2023Exploring Multi-Timestep Multi-Stage Diffusion Features for Hyperspectral Image Classification15 Jun
  14. 2023GCD-DDPM: A Generative Change Detection Model Based on Difference-Feature Guided DDPM6 Jun
  15. 2023DiffUCD:Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Change Detection with Semantic Correlation Diffusion Model21 May
  16. 2023Dual-Diffusion: Dual Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Blind Super-Resolution Reconstruction in RSIs20 May
  17. 2023Unsupervised Hyperspectral Pansharpening via Low-rank Diffusion Model18 May
  18. 2023Single-View Height Estimation with Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Models26 Apr
  19. 2023SpectralDiff: A Generative Framework for Hyperspectral Image Classification with Diffusion Models12 Apr

Other references · 126

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  5. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  6. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  7. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  8. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  9. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  10. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,058
  11. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,585
  12. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
38 more
  1. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  2. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  3. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,503
  4. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  5. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,152
  6. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,614
  7. 2020Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 3,253
  8. 2022DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusioncited by 3,025
  9. 2020Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learningcited by 2,287
  10. 2015Variational Inference with Normalizing Flowscited by 2,170
  11. 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,979
  12. 2021SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformercited by 1,887
  13. 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesiscited by 1,354
  14. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,300
  15. 2018Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networkscited by 1,264
  16. 2018ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,254
  17. 2021BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-modelscited by 1,245
  18. 2023ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillationcited by 1,219
  19. 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,178
  20. 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,114
  21. 2021MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformercited by 1,081
  22. 2022Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generationcited by 1,027
  23. 2022Diffusion Models in Vision: A Surveycited by 1,015
  24. 2022Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Imagescited by 991
  25. 2021Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Imagescited by 927
  26. 2022Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translationcited by 906
  27. 2023PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 864
  28. 2023Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inferencecited by 846
  29. 2024SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformerscited by 737
  30. 2022On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 725
  31. 2022AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognitioncited by 719
  32. 2022Equivariant Diffusion for Molecule Generation in 3Dcited by 677
  33. 2017DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 623
  34. 2015Holistically-Nested Edge Detectioncited by 592
  35. 2022Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models with Exponential Integratorcited by 532
  36. 2022All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Modelscited by 502
  37. 2022Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 489
  38. 2023InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generationcited by 395

50 most cited of 126 All 126 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 11; 2026: 14.

27 papers.

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  1. 2025Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectivescited by 18
  2. 2025EarthSynth: Generating Informative Earth Observation with Diffusion Modelscited by 12
  3. 2024Mask Approximation Net: A Novel Diffusion Model Approach for Remote Sensing Change Captioningcited by 11
  4. 2025Can Generative Geospatial Diffusion Models Excel as Discriminative Geospatial Foundation Models?cited by 10
  5. 2024UP-Diff: Latent Diffusion Model for Remote Sensing Urban Predictioncited by 2
  6. 2025A Decade of Deep Learning for Remote Sensing Spatiotemporal Fusion: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 2
  7. 2025COP-GEN-Beta: Unified Generative Modelling of COPernicus Imagery Thumbnailscited by 2
  8. 2025Diffusion Models for Hyperspectral Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 2
  9. 2025Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approachescited by 2
  10. 2026Location Is All You Need: Continuous Spatiotemporal Neural Representations of Earth Observation Datacited by 2
  11. 2026HuiYanEarth-SAR: A Foundation Model for High-Fidelity and Low-Cost Global Remote Sensing Imagery Generationcited by 2
  12. 2025SAR-to-RGB Translation with Latent Diffusion for Earth Observationcited by 1
15 more
  1. 2025Balanced Diffusion-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Remote Sensing Classificationcited by 1
  2. 2026Towards Realistic Remote Sensing Dataset Distillation with Discriminative Prototype-guided Diffusioncited by 1
  3. 2026COP-GEN: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Copernicus Earth Observation Datacited by 1
  4. 2026Remote Sensing Image Dehazing: A Systematic Review of Progress, Challenges, and Prospectscited by 1
  5. 2026Survey on Remote Sensing Scene Classification: From Traditional Methods to Large Generative AI Modelscited by 1
  6. 2026AnyBand-Diff: A Unified Remote Sensing Image Generation and Band Repair Framework with Spectral Priorscited by 1
  7. 2026MetaEarth-MM: Unified Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Generation with Scene-centered Joint Modelingcited by 1
  8. 2025POLARIS: A High-contrast Polarimetric Imaging Benchmark Dataset for Exoplanetary Disk Representation Learningcited by 0
  9. 2025Hyperspectral data augmentation with transformer-based diffusion modelscited by 0
  10. 2026Noise2Map: End-to-End Diffusion Model for Semantic Segmentation and Change Detectioncited by 0
  11. 2026Flow matching for Sentinel-2 super-resolution: implementation, application, and implicationscited by 0
  12. 2026D2-CDIG: Controlled Diffusion Remote Sensing Image Generation with Dual Priors of DEM and Cloud-Fogcited by 0
  13. 2026A Non-Reference Diffusion-Based Restoration Framework for Landsat 7 ETM+ SLC-off Imagery in Antarcticacited by 0
  14. 2026Beyond Edge Maps: Wavelet-Domain Conditioning for Multi-Adapter Map-to-Satellite Diffusioncited by 0
  15. 2026GeoCore-9B: Towards Geo-Aware Generative Foundation Models in Earth Observationcited by 0

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  1. 2023DDRF: Denoising Diffusion Model for Remote Sensing Image Fusion
  2. 2024Remote Diffusion
  3. 2025Object Fidelity Diffusion for Remote Sensing Image Generation
  4. 2025Environment-Aware Satellite Image Generation with Diffusion Models
  5. 2024Diffusion Models in Low-Level Vision: A Survey
  6. 2026SlimDiffSR: Toward Lightweight and Efficient Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model Distillation
  7. 2025A Gift from the Integration of Discriminative and Diffusion-based Generative Learning: Boundary Refinement Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation
  8. 2026DiffuSAM: Diffusion Guided Zero-Shot Object Grounding for Remote Sensing Imagery