Precipitation is a common phenomenon in the atmosphere. Owing to the difficulty of high spatial and temporal resolution cloud monitoring on ground, various remote sensing techniques are used in precipitation cloud monitoring. An introduction is made to the principles, techniques, and methods of rainfall cloud detection techniques, mainly the groundbased Doppler weather radar, and meteorological satellites. The findings and advances in the researches on the identification of cloud systems/clusters for different types of precipitation (including convective, stratoformcloud, and mixingcloud precipitation) with neural network, threshold, and wavelet analysis methods in China and abroad are reviewed, with emphasis on the threshold method. The problems encountered in use of both radar and satellite detection data are discussed.