Optical and infrared remote sensing, remote sensing imagery, and target perception; includes AI analysis of optical remote sensing data, but excludes radar remote sensing unrelated to optics.
A research team at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM), specializing in remote sensing information characterization, combined EPIC and MODIS satellite observations from 2015 to 2025 with ERA5 reanalysis and AERONET ground-based data to analyze diurnal variations in aerosol optical depth over Quetta and Karachi, Pakistan. The results were published in Remote Sensing. In representative scenarios, aerosol optical depth in Quetta rose by 0.159 from morning to afternoon, while Karachi saw an increase of 0.066. The study provides a multi-source remote sensing analysis method for monitoring diurnal aerosol variations in regions with sparse ground observations.
The spaceborne High-precision Main Greenhouse gas Imaging instrument (HMI) aboard the Pujiang-4 satellite began imaging on September 27 and downlinked its first data. The developer team led by Xiong Wei at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) performed a preliminary assessment and found that the payload's functions and performance met design requirements. HMI uses an information modulation technique combining spatial imaging and spectral interferometry, acquiring hyperspectral data in a 520 km orbit with a 30 km swath, spatial resolution better than 400 m, and spectral resolution better than 0.125 nm. From the first data, the team preliminarily estimated the methane emission rate of the Bogatyr open-pit mine in Kazakhstan at about 27.52±1.70 tons per hour.
Why we recommend it: The original article gives HMI's swath, spatial resolution and spectral resolution, and uses first data to estimate methane emissions from a mining area, showing the on-orbit performance of the combined spatial imaging and spectral interferometry approach
Xinguang Optoelectronics announced on September 22 plans to invest RMB 100 million to establish a wholly owned subsidiary, Hangzhou Xinguang Precision Measurement Systems Co., Ltd., in Hangzhou, with an initial paid-in capital of RMB 10 million. Its main business will cover optical test systems including optical instruments, measurement and inspection equipment, optoelectronic sensors and projection objectives.
A paper in Light: Science & Applications combines dual combs with compressive ghost imaging and uses deep learning reconstruction to achieve hyperspectral imaging.
A team led by researcher Chen Cheng at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) used data from the Directional Polarimetric Camera (DPC) and the High-precision Polarization Scanning Polarimeter (POSP) aboard the Gaofen-5 (02) satellite to propose new methods for retrieving cloud optical and microphysical parameters. The results were published in JQSRT and IEEE TGRS. The spatial resolution of the DPC cloud particle size distribution product was improved to 3.3 km, close to the original observations. The POSP algorithm identified 0.865-2.25 micrometers as the optimal dual-channel combination, raising the proportion of pixels with valid cloud parameter retrievals by 52.06%. The retrieval results show good consistency with MODIS and VIIRS cloud products.
Ozone lidar uses the differential absorption principle for atmospheric monitoring. All-solid-state products are easy to maintain and integrate, and are expected to become mainstream.
Yanguang Photonics has completed an A+ funding round backed by Houxue Capital and Huayi Venture Capital, focusing on ultra-precision optics for aerospace and semiconductors.
A team led by Peng Xie at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Mechanics has made progress in multidimensional multiplexed optical computing, improving the parallelism of optical computing.
A team at the Optoelectronics Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics has published two results in Remote Sensing, proposing the lightweight keypoint localization framework GeoAdapt and the frequency-domain low-rank adaptation segmentation method Freq-LoRA for aerial target sensing in ground-based optical remote sensing. GeoAdapt has only 5.95M parameters and achieves PCK@0.05D of 89.3%; Freq-LoRA requires only 559K trainable parameters and reaches a mean intersection-over-union of 0.904 across five simulated weather datasets, achieving 96.1% of full fine-tuning performance.
The Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics has made progress in research on light-field transport in spatiotemporal non-Markovian random media.
At the 2025 National Science and Technology Awards Conference held on July 8, the Anhui Institute of Optics and Mechanics led one project and participated in two that won the National Science and Technology Progress Second Prize, covering atmospheric environment satellite remote sensing, precision monitoring of volatile organic compounds, and a major aviation remote sensing facility. The lead project, "Domestic Hyperspectral Satellite Atmospheric Environment Remote Sensing Technology, Equipment and Applications," developed the spaceborne atmospheric trace gas differential absorption spectrometer EMI. The participating projects include chemical park VOCs monitoring based on Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy equipment and the National Major Science and Technology Infrastructure for Aviation Remote Sensing Systems.
The Optical Remote Sensing Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Mechanics published a paper in IEEE TGRS proposing an attention-enhanced Kolmogorov-Arnold network (AKAN) method to retrieve aerosol optical depth from POSP polarization observations by the Gaofen-5B satellite. The team built more than 240,000 matched samples using AERONET ground-based data. The model achieved a coefficient of determination R² of 0.9336 and a root mean square error of 0.0492, with 94.25% of results falling within the expected error range. SHAP analysis showed that the sensitive bands and scattering angle features identified by the model are broadly consistent with radiative transfer principles.
The Basic Science Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Mechanics published three results in Optics and Laser Technology, Optics Express, and Optics Letters, improving the measurement accuracy and spectral resolution of laser heterodyne radiometers (LHR).
Guo Haitao's team at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Mechanics has mastered key full-chain technologies for mid- and long-wave infrared anti-resonant hollow-core fiber.
Guangzai Technology, an incubated company of the Hangzhou Institute of Optics and Mechanics, collaborated with the University of Cambridge, Southeast University and others to publish a paper in Sustainable Cities and Society, proposing SCE-Model, a spatiotemporal carbon emission model optimized by machine learning and validated by LiDAR. The model output is highly consistent with coherent differential absorption LiDAR observations (R² = 0.79; ±5 ppm), enabling hourly, block-level carbon emission mapping.