Automatic Point Target Detection for Interactive Visual Analysis of SAR Images

Point target analysis is an important tool to analyze the quality of SAR images. To permit interactive visual analysis, visualization applications need to automatically detect point targets in a SAR image and estimate associated quality measurements such as the peak sidelobe ratio (PSLR). This task is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose methods for automatic point target detection that work on hierarchical data structures and process the image data on the graphics processing unit (GPU) to allow interactive use. For each detected point target in the currently visualized area of the image, the visualization application can then display color-coded quality measurements, thus providing the user with an overview of the point targets in the scene as well as an immediate impression of the SAR image quality. Detailed point target analysis results can be displayed on demand.