# U-Net with Hadamard Transform and DCT Latent Spaces for Next-day Wildfire Spread Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Next Day Wildfire Spread: A Machine Learning Data Set to Predict Wildfire Spreading from Remote-Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02447/) (2021)
- [A Probabilistic Hadamard U-Net for MRI Bias Field Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05024/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [FireSenseNet: A Dual-Branch CNN with Cross-Attentive Feature Interaction for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07675/) (2026)
- [Modular Deep Learning Mechanisms for Auditable Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17763/) (2026)
- [ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14071/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We developed a lightweight and computationally efficient tool for next-day wildfire spread prediction using multimodal satellite data as input. The deep learning model, which we call Transform Domain Fusion UNet (TD-FusionUNet), incorporates trainable Hadamard Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform layers that apply two-dimensional transforms, enabling the network to capture essential "frequency" components in orthogonalized latent spaces. Additionally, we introduce custom preprocessing techniques, including random margin cropping and a Gaussian mixture model, to enrich the representation of the sparse pre-fire masks and enhance the model's generalization capability. The TD-FusionUNet is evaluated on two datasets which are the Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset released by Google Research in 2023, and WildfireSpreadTS dataset. Our proposed TD-FusionUNet achieves an F1 score of 0.591 with 370k parameters, outperforming the UNet baseline using ResNet18 as the encoder reported in the WildfireSpreadTS dataset while using substantially fewer parameters. These results show that the proposed latent space fusion model balances accuracy and efficiency under a lightweight setting, making it suitable for real time wildfire prediction applications in resource limited environments.