Full 3-D electromagnetic subsurface imaging using ground penetrating radar

Abstract

This work is concerned with the 3-D imaging problem of buried objects via enhanced microwave tomography ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys. In particular, we propose a model based imaging approach, which exploits the Born approximation and accounts for the vectorial nature of the scattering phenomenon as well as for the presence of the air-soil interface. Moreover, a truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) inversion scheme is applied to achieve stable and accurate results. The advantages offered by a full 3-D inversion algorithm with respect to the commonly adopted strategy, which produces 3-D images by interpolating 2-D reconstructions, are assessed against experimental data gathered in laboratory controlled conditions.