Accelerating SAR imaging using vector extension on multi-core SIMD CPU

With the development of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology in recent years, we have to face the huge amount of data. So, the fast image processing technology seems to be really important in the domain of SAR. Based on the situation above, a new method to accelerate SAR image processing is proposed in this paper. The proposed method employs SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions and OpenMP (Open Multiprocessing) technology on multi-core SIMD CPU to realize parallel optimization on image processing algorithms. The CS (Chirp Scaling) algorithm is also chosen to process SAR data in our experiment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIMD based implementation is able to increase performance more than 20 times when compared to the single-core baseline used.