PARALLEL SAR IMAGE-ENHANCEMENT

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers the possibility of imaging the e arth's surface independent of time of day or weather conditions. SAR i mages differ from optical images in that they contain speckle, multipl icative noise with a poor signal-to-noise ratio of about 1 to 1. Sever al routines for noise despeckling and segmentation were ported to dist ributed memory platforms within the EUROPORT-2 PULSAR project. Excelle nt parallel speedup was observed for ANNEAL, the most promising despec kling routine. Reasonable but limited parallel performance was obtaine d on RWSEG, a segmentation routine, because relatively large overlap r egions were involved. The nature of these operations means that there is no one correct result to which output images can be compared. Howev er, differences between images obtained from sequential and parallel i mplementations were encouragingly small.