SAR image processing using GPU

Abstract

Synthetic aperture Radar (SAR) has been extensively used for space-borne Earth observations in recent times. In conventional SAR systems analog beam-steering techniques are capable of implementing multiple operational modes, such as the Stripmap, ScanSAR, and Spotlight, to fulfill the different requirements in terms of spatial resolution and coverage. Future RADAR satellites need to resolve the complex issues such as wide area coverage and resolution. Digital beam-forming (DBF) is a promising technique to overcome the problems mentioned above. In communication satellites DBF technique is already implemented. This paper discuses the relevance of DBF in space-borne RADAR satellites for enhancements to quality imaging. To implement DBF in SAR, processing of SAR data is an important step. This work focused on processing of Level 1.1 and 1.5 SAR image data. The SAR raw data is computationally intensive to process. To resolve the computation problem, high performance computing (HPC) is necessary. The relevance of HPC for SAR data processing using an off-the-shelf graphical processing unit (GPU) over CPU is discussed in this paper. Quantitative estimates on SAR image processing performance comparisons using both CPU and GPU are also provided as validation for the results.