# Attentive Contextual Attention for Cloud Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Cloud Removal in Global and All-Season Sentinel-2 Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07683/) (2020)
- [SEN12MS-CR-TS: A Remote Sensing Data Set for Multi-modal Multi-temporal Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09613/) (2022)
- [A Remote Sensing Image Dataset for Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00600/) (2019)
- [Cloud Removal for Remote Sensing Imagery via Spatial Attention Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13015/) (2020)
- [UnCRtainTS: Uncertainty Quantification for Cloud Removal in Optical Satellite Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05464/) (2023)
- [Filmy Cloud Removal on Satellite Imagery with Multispectral Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04835/) (2017)
- [Missing Data Reconstruction in Remote Sensing image with a Unified Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Deep Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08369/) (2018)
- [GLF-CR: SAR-Enhanced Cloud Removal with Global-Local Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02850/) (2022)
- [PMAA: A Progressive Multi-scale Attention Autoencoder Model for High-performance Cloud Removal from Multi-temporal Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16565/) (2023)
- [Cloud Removal in Satellite Images Using Spatiotemporal Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06838/) (2019)
- [Non-local tensor completion for multitemporal remotely sensed images inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10240/) (2018)
- [Removing Clouds and Recovering Ground Observations in Satellite Image Sequences via Temporally Contiguous Robust Matrix Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03915/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [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)
- [SOMA-1M: A Large-Scale SAR-Optical Multi-resolution Alignment Dataset for Multi-Task Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05480/) (2026)
- [Task-Guided Prompting for Unified Remote Sensing Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02742/) (2026)
- [ATT-CR: Adaptive Triangular Transformer for Cloud Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05999/) (2026)
- [EORestore-Agent: Fidelity-Guided Agentic Restoration of Remote Sensing Images with Composite Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06196/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cloud cover can significantly hinder the use of remote sensing images for Earth observation, prompting urgent advancements in cloud removal technology. Recently, deep learning strategies have shown strong potential in restoring cloud-obscured areas. These methods utilize convolution to extract intricate local features and attention mechanisms to gather long-range information, improving the overall comprehension of the scene. However, a common drawback of these approaches is that the resulting images often suffer from blurriness, artifacts, and inconsistencies. This is partly because attention mechanisms apply weights to all features based on generalized similarity scores, which can inadvertently introduce noise and irrelevant details from cloud-covered areas. To overcome this limitation and better capture relevant distant context, we introduce a novel approach named Attentive Contextual Attention (AC-Attention). This method enhances conventional attention mechanisms by dynamically learning data-driven attentive selection scores, enabling it to filter out noise and irrelevant features effectively. By integrating the AC-Attention module into the DSen2-CR cloud removal framework, we significantly improve the model's ability to capture essential distant information, leading to more effective cloud removal. Our extensive evaluation of various datasets shows that our method outperforms existing ones regarding image reconstruction quality. Additionally, we conducted ablation studies by integrating AC-Attention into multiple existing methods and widely used network architectures. These studies demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of AC-Attention and reveal its ability to focus on relevant features, thereby improving the overall performance of the networks. The code is available at urlhttps://github.com/huangwenwenlili/ACA-CRNet.