SpaSE-UNet3D: Sensor-Driven Wildfire Detection and Progression Prediction from VIIRS Multispectral Imagery

Abstract

Timely wildfire monitoring depends critically on optical and thermal infrared sensor observations from spaceborne instruments. The TS-SatFire benchmark (2025) consolidates multispectral VIIRS image stacks from Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 for three tasks: active fire (AF) detection, burned area (BA) mapping, and fire progression (FP) prediction. We make two contributions. First, a systematic label-quality audit reveals that many fires lack ground-truth annotations; 18 training fires and 2 test fires were excluded for AF, and the two unannotated test fires cannot be scored by any model. We further document the benchmark’s scoring procedure, which differs from ours in ways that make the two sets of figures incomparable, and the BA label encoding in the released GeoTIFFs; the BA task is only audited. Second, we propose SpaSE-UNet3D, a spatial squeeze-and-excitation 3D U-Net whose spatial-only (1,3,3) convolutions avoid temporal mixing on short observation windows, while SE channel attention reweights the VIIRS spectral bands dynamically. With micro-averaging over all test pixels, it reaches F1 = 0.8549±0.0005 on AF and 0.3845±0.0221 on FP at TS = 2, matching or exceeding the strongest published baselines on their respective terms. A single-day AF input reaches 0.8520±0.0008, within 0.003 of the two-day figure, indicating that one acquisition carries most of the detectable signal, whereas published baselines use up to six days; on FP, we use one third of their temporal context. An ablation shows the spatial-only design matches the accuracy of a full (3,3,3) network with 2.72× fewer parameters. Code and results are publicly available.