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.
The remote sensing information characterization research team at AIOFM combined EPIC and MODIS satellite observations, ERA5 reanalysis, and AERONET ground-based data from 2015 to 2025 to analyze the diurnal variation of aerosol optical depth in Quetta and Karachi, Pakistan. The results were published in Remote Sensing. In representative scenarios, aerosol optical depth in Quetta increased by 0.159 in the afternoon compared with the morning, and by 0.066 in Karachi. The study provides a multi-source remote sensing analysis method for monitoring diurnal aerosol variation in regions with sparse ground observations.
The High-precision Main Greenhouse gas Imaging instrument (HMI) aboard the Pujiang-4 satellite began imaging on September 27 and downlinked its first data. The instrument's developer, Xiong Wei's team at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM), conducted a preliminary assessment showing that the payload's functions and performance meet design requirements. HMI uses an information modulation technique combining spatial imaging and spectral interferometry; in a 520 km orbit it acquires hyperspectral data with a 30 km swath, spatial resolution better than 400 m, and spectral resolution better than 0.125 nm. Based on 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 width, spatial resolution and spectral resolution, and uses the first data to estimate methane emission rates at a mining site, showing the on-orbit performance of the combined spatial imaging and spectral interferometry scheme.
Xinguang Optoelectronics announced on September 22 that it 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. The unit will focus on optical test systems including optical instruments, measurement and inspection equipment, optoelectronic sensors and projection objectives.
A paper in Light: Science & Applications combines dual-comb spectroscopy with computational 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) has proposed new methods for retrieving cloud optical and microphysical parameters using data from the Directional Polarimetric Camera (DPC) and the Polarization Scanning Photometer (POSP) aboard the Gaofen-5 (02) satellite. The results were published in JQSRT and IEEE TGRS. The spatial resolution of the DPC cloud particle size distribution product has been improved to 3.3 km, close to the original observations. The POSP algorithm identified 0.865–2.25 µm as the optimal two-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 units are easy to maintain and integrate, and are expected to become mainstream.
Yanguang Photonics has completed an A+ funding round from Houxue Capital and Huayi Venture Capital, focusing on ultra-precision optics for aerospace and semiconductors.
Xie Peng's team at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) has made progress in multidimensional multiplexed optical computing, improving the parallelism of optical computing.
A team from the Optoelectronics Center at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) published two papers 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 just 559K trainable parameters and reaches a mean intersection-over-union of 0.904 across five simulated weather datasets, or 96.1% of full fine-tuning performance.
The Shanghai Institute of Optics and Mechanics (SIOM) has made progress in research on light propagation in spatiotemporally non-Markovian random media.
At the 2025 National Science and Technology Awards Conference held on July 8, three achievements led or co-developed by the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) received the National Science and Technology Progress Award (Second Class): one led by AIOFM and two with its participation. The work covers 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 Environmental Monitoring Instrument (EMI), a differential optical absorption spectrometer for atmospheric trace gases. 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 Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) published a paper in IEEE TGRS proposing an attention-enhanced Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (AKAN) method to retrieve aerosol optical depth from polarization observations by the POSP instrument on the GF-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, a root-mean-square error of 0.0492, and 94.25% of results fell 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 at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) published three results in Optics and Laser Technology, Optics Express and Optics Letters, improving the measurement accuracy and spectral resolution of laser heterodyne radiometers (LHRs).
The team of Guo Haitao at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Mechanics has mastered the key full-chain technologies for mid- and long-wave infrared anti-resonant hollow-core fiber.
Guangzai Technology, a company incubated by HIOM, 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 with machine learning and validated by LiDAR. Model outputs showed strong agreement with coherent differential absorption LiDAR observations (R² = 0.79; ±5 ppm), enabling hourly, block-level carbon emission mapping.