FAST Design for Large-Scale Satellite Image Processing

Abstract

This study proposes a distributed parallel processing system, called the Fast Analysis System for remote sensing daTa(FAST), for large-scale satellite image processing and analysis. FAST is a system that designs jobs in vertices and sequences, and distributes and processes them simultaneously. FAST manages data based on the Hadoop Distributed File System, controls entire jobs based on Apache Spark, and performs tasks in parallel in multiple slave nodes based on a docker container design. FAST enables the high-performance processing of progressively accumulated large-volume satellite images. Because the unit task is performed based on Docker, it is possible to reuse existing source codes for designing and implementing unit tasks. Additionally, the system is robust against software/hardware faults. To prove the capability of the proposed system, we performed an experiment to generate the original satellite images as ortho-images, which is a pre-processing step for all image analyses. In the experiment, when FAST was configured with eight slave nodes, it was found that the processing of a satellite image took less than 30 sec. Through these results, we proved the suitability and practical applicability of the FAST design.