GPu-based framework for interactive visualization of SAR data

Abstract

Abstract-Synthetic Aperture Radar data presents specific problems for interactive visualization. The high amount of multiplicative speckle noise has to be reduced. The high dynamic range of the amplitude data must be mapped to the lower dynamic range of display devices in a way that makes image features appropriately visible. In addition to interactive navigation in the data, it is desirable to allow interactive selection of despeckling and dynamic range reduction methods and adjustment of their parameters.Graphics processing units (GPUs) can be seen as ubiquitous parallel coprocessors with extreme computational power. In this paper, we propose a GPU-based framework for interactive visualization of SAR data. Data management techniques are used to make full use of the GPU. We reworked well-known despeckling and dynamic range reduction techniques for the GPU programming model and implemented them in our framework. Both navigation in large data sets and adjustment of processing parameters are fully interactive.

GPU-based framework for distributed interactive 3D visualization of multimodal remote sensing data

“…Interactive adjustment of processing parameters is especially useful for data sets that cannot be transformed to a single RGB image without loss of information. For SAR images, such a processing chain is described in [2]. Similar processing chains can be built for other modalities.…”

“…The programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) of today's commodity graphics hardware provide the computational power that is necessary to interactively process, combine, and render remote sensing data [2].…”

Interactive Dynamic Range Reduction for SAR Images

“…A discussion of the stream programming model and the restrictions of GPU programming can be found in [5]. To achieve interactive performance even with very large data sets, we use a tile-based data management approach [2]. TMOs that require access to the whole data set to process each pixel, e.g.…”

“…3 in our interactive GPU-based visualization framework [2]. This allows to explore the properties of each method in a wide range of situations.…”

“…This enables the user to get the most out of the visualized data. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are well suited for the task of interactive SAR data visualization because they provide the necessary computational power [2].…”