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PULSAR: a new tool for SAR image classification and understanding

The PULSAR project, aiming for the parallelization and adaptation of SAR segmentation and filtering codes, is carried out under the EUROPORT 2 activities within the European funded ESPRIT 3 program and running over 2 years. An international consortium consisting of companies working in the informatics and earth observation domain was created to perform the project as an interdisciplinary study. Different actions carried out in the past year and a half were mainly the testing and parallelization of the different codes, their adaptation to selected applications and the benchmarking in terms of speed and reliability of results. A number of codes were improved and speeded-up even before the parallelization and better benchmarking results could thus be achieved. For the detailed testing of the codes three key applications were identified where radar remote sensing will play a key role in the next few years. These applications are the oil spill detection, the surface management of temperate (European) agriculture and the tropical agriculture (rice surface detection and monitoring). For all three application fields different parameters available in the software were tested and results show great improvements of the interpretation capabilities in relation to the initially speckled ERS SAR data. The segmentation specifically allowed us to obtain field boundaries of agriculture fields over the test site Bourges (France) and areas of similar growth conditions for rice areas in Indonesia. The speed of the processing of one 512 by 512 pixel image was at 15 minutes using the serial version and 2 minutes using the parallelized version with 4 processors. The comparison between the serial and parallel results allowed us to investigate the stability of the parallel process which was below 2% inaccuracy. Thus, it can be underlined that the PULSAR project allowed us to develop a new and very useful tool for the interpretation of radar images. For specific applications it is intended to further adapt the tool in order to be able to deliver turn-key solutions to the user.