A segmented block processing approach to focus synthetic aperture radar data on multicore processors

A general-purpose parallel scheme for efficiently focusing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data on multicore-based shared-memory architectures is presented. The proposed parallel solution is based on a canonical processing pattern that exploit a segmented-block-based approach, and it works successfully on data acquired by different SAR platforms. Insofar as significant portion of the focusing algorithm is amenable to tiling, our approach decomposes the problem into simpler subproblems of the same type, also providing a suitable mechanism to explicitly control the granularity of computation through the proper specification of the tiling. Relevant implementation makes use of multithreading and high-performance libraries. Achievable performances are then experimentally investigated by quantifying the benefit of the parallelism incorporated into the prototype solution, thus demonstrating the validity of our approach.