Efficient back projection imaging approach for airborne GPR using NUFFT technique

Abstract

Airborne ground penetrating radar (GPR) can be used for detecting underground targets in dangerous area or area covered by heavy vegetation. Since the back projection (BP) imaging method can easily compensate for the electromagnetic wave's refraction effect, it can be a practical imaging method for airborne GPR system. Nevertheless, the conventional BP imaging method usually suffers from high computational load. In order to reduce the computational complexity, an efficient airborne GPR BP imaging algorithm based on non-uniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) technique is proposed in this paper. The effectiveness and improvement of computational efficiency of the proposed imaging method are verified via processing the full-wave synthetic data generated by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method.