Performance analysis of GPU-based SAR and interferometric SAR image processing

Modern SAR and Interferometric SAR image processing make intensive usage of computer hardware resources to cope with the computational power needed to process complex images. An increasing interest in this field is being given to new approaches based on General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). In this paper we evaluate the performance of three common SAR algorithms: focusing, geocoding, and persistent scatterers. Each algorithm is implemented using different CPU- and GPU-based approaches that are used to evaluate the performance achievable through each technology. According to our measurements and depending on the kind of algorithm, speedups of about one order of magnitude can be obtained with relative low effort.