Performance Study of Satellite Image Processing on Graphics Processors Unit Using CUDA

High resolution satellite images are now widely used for a variety of mapping applications including photogrammetry, GIS data acquisition and visualization. As the spectral and spatial data size of satellite images increases, a greater processing power is needed to process the images. The solution of these problems is parallel systems. Parallel processing techniques have been developed for improving the performance of image processing along with the development of the computational power. However, conventional CPU-based parallel computing is often not good enough for the demand for computational speed to process the images. The GPU is a good candidate to achieve this goal. Recently GPUs are used in the field of highly complex processing including many loop operations such as mathematical transforms, ray tracing. In this study we proposed a technique for parallel processing of high resolution satellite images using GPU. We implemented a spectral radiometric processing algorithm on Landsat-7 ETM+ imagery using CUDA, a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA for GPU. Also performance of the algorithm on GPU and CPU is compared.