Performance Portability Study of an Automatic Target Detection and Classification Algorithm for Hyperspectral Image Analysis using OpenCL

Recent advances in heterogeneous high performance computing (HPC) have opened new avenues for demanding remote sensing applications. Perhaps one of the most popular algorithm in target detection and identification is the automatic target detection and classification algorithm (ATDCA) widely used in the hyperspectral image analysis community. Previous research has already investigated the mapping of ATDCA on graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), showing impressive speedup factors that allow its exploitation in time-critical scenarios. Based on these studies, our work explores the performance portability of a tuned OpenCL implementation across a range of processing devices including multicore processors, GPUs and other accelerators. This approach differs from previous papers, which focused on achieving the optimal performance on each platform. Here, we are more interested in the following issues: (1) evaluating if a single code written in OpenCL allows us to achieve acceptable performance across all of them, and (2) assessing the gap between our portable OpenCL code and those hand-tuned versions previously investigated. Our study includes the analysis of different tuning techniques that expose data parallelism as well as enable an efficient exploitation of the complex memory hierarchies found in these new heterogeneous devices. Experiments have been conducted using hyperspectral data sets collected by NASA’s Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) and the Hyperspectral Digital Imagery Collection Experiment (HYDICE) sensors. To the best of our knowledge, this kind of analysis has not been previously conducted in the hyperspectral imaging processing literature, and in our opinion it is very important in order to really calibrate the possibility of using heterogeneous platforms for efficient hyperspectral imaging processing in real remote sensing missions.