Real-Time SAR Simulation on Graphics Processing Units

SAR simulators usually apply the ray-tracing approach. Ray-tracing, which is also used for virtual image generation, is based on accurate physical models, but is unfortunately rather computational time intensive. Because of this, real-time applications, like interactive visualisation, in general use the rasterization method. Rasterization is less complex to calculate and is therefore faster. This paper presents the real-time SAR simulator SARViz, which uses rasterization and is implemented on programmable graphics processing units, which are nowadays included in most modern PCs. SARViz is able to visualise even complex scenes in real-time, using the tremendous development in computer graphics for the next generation SAR simulator.