From 8 Seconds to 370ms: Kernel-Fused SAR Imaging on Apple Silicon via Single-Dispatch FFT Pipelines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a kernel-fused SAR imaging pipeline on Apple Silicon that significantly accelerates processing time while maintaining image quality, leveraging hardware-specific optimizations.

Contribution

It presents the first kernel-fused SAR pipeline on GPU, achieving 22x speedup and exploiting Apple Silicon's SIMD hardware for efficient FFT computation.

Findings

Processed a 4096x4096 SAR scene in 370ms, 22x faster than previous methods.

Maintained radar image quality with zero SNR deviation.

Optimized FFT using Apple's simdgroup_matrix hardware MMA.

Abstract

We present the first kernel-fused SAR Range Doppler pipeline on any GPU platform. By fusing FFT, matched-filter multiply, and IFFT into a single Metal compute dispatch -- keeping all intermediate data in 32\,KiB on-chip memory -- we process a $4096\!\times\!4096$ complex SAR scene in \textbf{370\,ms} on an Apple M1 GPU, a \textbf{22$\times$} speedup over the multi-dispatch baseline (8.16\,s). We further report the first FFT to exploit Apple's \texttt{simdgroup\_matrix} 8$\times$8 hardware MMA, enabled by an in-place Cooley--Tukey decimation-in-frequency formulation that halves the memory footprint versus Stockham. Radar image quality is preserved: all five point targets show 0.0\,dB SNR deviation from the unfused FP32 reference.