A Generic Framework for the Development of Geospatial Processing Pipelines on Clusters

The amount of remote sensing (RS) data available for applications is constantly growing due to the rise of very high resolution sensors and short-repeat-cycle satellites. Consequently, tackling the computational complexity in Earth observation information extraction is rising as a major challenge. Resorting to high-performance computing (HPC) is becoming a common practice, since this provides environments and programming facilities that are able to speed up processes. In particular, clusters are flexible cost-effective systems that are able to perform data-intensive tasks ideally fulfilling any computational requirement. However, their use typically implies a significant coding effort to build proper implementations of specific processing pipelines. This letter presents a generic framework for the development of RS images processing applications targeting cluster computing. It is based on common open-source libraries and leverages the parallelization of a wide variety of image processing pipelines in a transparent way. Performances on typical RS tasks implemented using the proposed framework demonstrate a great potential for the effective and timely processing of large amount of data.