摘要： Earth Observation (EO) through remote sensing satellites gathers reliable information about the environment. The evolution of satellite instrumentation leads to considerable satellite data volumes which require on one hand, mathematically and statistically based algorithms to extract valuable information and, on the other hand, increased computational power for processing. The paper proposes image processing algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images together with application-specific hardware architectures for satellite imagery. It is well known that performing feature extraction in image analysis involves complex search algorithms implementation. A novel approach based on content-addressable memories (CAM) for search algorithms optimization is proposed. Results in terms of computational time are presented for the proposed approach and compared with classical image processing search algorithms implementations.