A Multi‐granularity Parallel Model for Unified Remote Sensing Image Processing WebServices

The growth of the Web has resulted in the Web‐based sharing of distributed geospatial data and computational resources. The Geospatial Processing Web (GeoPW) described here is a set of services that provide a wide array of geo‐processing utilities over the Web and make geo‐processing functionalities easily accessible to users. High‐performance remote sensing image processing is an important component of the GeoPW. The design and implementation of high‐performance image processing are, at present, an actively pursued research topic. Researchers have proposed various parallel strategies for single image processing algorithm, based on a computer science approach to parallel processing. This article proposes a multi‐granularity parallel model for various remote sensing image processing algorithms. This model has four hierarchical interfaces that are labeled the Region of Interest oriented (ROI‐oriented), Decompose/Merge, Hierarchical Task Chain and Dynamic Task interfaces or sub‐models. In addition, interfaces, definitions, parallel task scheduling and fault‐tolerance mechanisms are described in detail. Based on the model and methods, we propose an open‐source online platform named OpenRS‐Cloud. A number of parallel algorithms were uniformly and efficiently developed, thus certifying the validity of the multi‐granularity parallel model for unified remote sensing image processing web services.