SAR products in milliseconds: leveraging massive parallelization on GPUs to enable interactive SAR processing

Abstract:
With Earth Observation data volumes growing tremendously, it is fundamental to find novel methods to support data exploitation, possibly combining multiple data sources. Moreover, the continuous improvement of standard data processing often requires substantial reprocessing to create homogeneous and highly accurate datasets. This paper presents recent results and near-future opportunities enabled by multiple interconnected activities undertaken by CGI Estonia in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), which address the usage of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) for performing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing with very high speed and efficient resource usage.