Synthetic aperture radar signal processing in parallel using GPGPU

Abstract

In this work an efficient parallel implementation of the Chirp Scaling Algorithm for Synthetic Aperture Radar processing is presented. The architecture selected for the implementation is the general purpose graphic processing unit, as it is well suited for scientific applications and real-time implementation of algorithms. The analysis of a first implementation led to several improvements which resulted in an important speed-up. Details of the issues found are explained, and the performance improvement of their correction explicitly shown.

Acceleration of Synthetic Aperture Radar for On-board Space Systems

“…Lundgren et al [10] and McFarlin et al [11] accelerated SAR processing on the IBM Cell processor, while Imperatore et al [8] evaluated it in desktop multicore architectures. Di Bisceglie et al [5] and Denham et al [4] evaluated the capabilities of desktop GPUs for SAR processing. However, our work is focused on embedded multicores and GPUs which can be adopted for on-board processing.…”

Weather radar data processing on graphic cards

“…The results show a parallel speedup greater than 17× relative to the host CPU (including data transfer) even though the application was not optimized. By using thread and memory optimization steps, a better performance and almost-real-time operation could be achieved [5,6].…”