Improvement of target imaging quality by multi-polarization MIMO GPR

Abstract

As for the conventional ground penetrating radar (GPR) system, the detection result is seriously affected by the antenna directionality, the target scattering sections (RCS) and multi-polarization characteristics of electromagnetic wave. The MIMO (Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output) array antenna GPR technology can overcome the influence of RCS, electromagnetic polarization and improve the quality of target imaging effectively. In this paper, we put forward the MIMO GPR technology based on the “plane wave like (PWL)”. It uses the conventional radar system with multiple antennas and takes the “plane wave like” as transmit resource. It has higher stability and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The multi-polarization detection mode can obtain more precise waveform of incident wave. Combining with multi-polarization phase information of target signal, we can obtain more precise location parameters of target and improve the detection accuracy. In addition, because the antenna interval is far less than wavelength of source signal, the multi-polarization and multi-input signal can compress the width of target response polarized wave and increase the target-range resolution. The result of simulation and experiments demonstrate that the MIMO GPR with multi-polarization detection mode has higher target imaging accuracy than that of the conventional GPR system.