Design and Development of a SWIR Optical-Electronic Payload for Earth Remote Sensing Applications

Wildfires are significant ecological and environmental disasters, impacting forests, ecosystems, climate stability and human life. The visible-spectrum imagery-based traditional wildfire monitoring system can fail to perform well in the presence of smoke, haze and low lighting. A number of machine learning and deep learning techniques have been proposed, but most of the studies do not provide an integrated Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) optical-electronic payload framework along with an intelligent optimization technique. The objective of this research is to design an intelligent SWIR-based optical-electronic payload architecture for accurate detection and remote sensing of wildfire and Earth applications via deep learning and optimization techniques. The proposed framework is based on Sentinel-2 SWIR satellite data layers with wildfire and non-wildfire samples. To enhance the quality of the images and the representation of their spectral domain, the following preprocessing operations are carried out: resizing, image normalization, SWIR band extraction, and data augmentation. The following spectral feature extraction techniques are then used: burn area analysis, vegetation stress analysis, and thermal anomaly detection. The framework also incorporates SWIR optical payload design, electronic subsystem development and SWIR InGaAs sensor modeling. Finally, a Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)–Residual Network 50 (ResNet50) model optimized by Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) is used for wildfire classification and hyperparameter tuning. The proposed framework achieved an accuracy of 91.03%, precision of 91.27%, recall of 91.03%, and F1-score of 91.01%. The wildfire detection capability, classification robustness, and convergence performance were enhanced through the integration of SWIR spectral analysis, hybrid deep learning and GWO. The proposed framework offers an effective and trustworthy solution for intelligent wildfire monitoring and Earth remote sensing applications with enhanced spectral sensing and classification performance.