Distributed SAR Image Change Detection with OpenCL-Enabled Spark

Distributed processing framework has been widely used in remote-sensing field. Spark, as a popular distributed computing framework, has been utilized to deal with big remote sensing data. However, it is inefficient due to that the application is not only data intensive but also computation intensive. For example, in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image change detection, clustering analysis can consume a lot of computing time and memory resources dealing with big remote sensing data. Coprocessors (GPU, MIC, etc.) have a high-compute power, which is able to handle computation intensive tasks. In this paper, we proposed an OpenCL-enabled Spark framework to accelerate Kernel Fuzzy C-Mean (KFCM) algorithm for SAR image change detection. And the computation intensive operations of KFCM are transferred to coprocessors of the cluster through the proposed OpenCL-enabled Spark framework. The experimental results on real SAR image indicate that the implementation on OpenCL-enabled Spark is efficient and scalable.