PULSAR: Parallel noise despeckling of SAR images

Abstract

Anneal provides a means by which users can obtain significant image enhancement over other general purpose techniques for SAR noise despeckling. Its principle disadvantage lies in its rather steep computation requirements, particularly on standard sized images (2048 by 2048 and 4096 by 4096). However, PULSAR has been able to produce a portable parallel version of Anneal that has excellent parallel performance on both workstation clusters and dedicated distributed memory parallel platforms. Speed-ups of 90 have been observed using 96 processors on the GC PowerPlus with the relatively small 1024 by 1024 image. Similar performance is expected on other platforms with a reasonable interconnect. Thus, Anneal is suitable for both providers of satellite SAR images (who likely employ MPP's to perform the initial low-level processing) as well as for interpreters and direct users of SAR data, whose source of computation comes from networked workstations.