Ground penetrating radar signal processing for road monitoring and damage detection

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) signal processing is a nondestructive technique, particularly promising for soil characteristics interpretation. In fact, pavement damage is actually one of the most crucial problems in roads. A preliminary detection and a subsequent classification of the pavement damage, based on an automatic GPR analysis, have been performed and experimentally validated. An optimum detection procedure is performed. It implements the classical Neyman-Pearson radar test. All the settings needed by the procedure have been estimated from a training set of measures. The overall performance has been evaluated by looking at the usual receiver's operating curve. The results evidence that a reasonable performance has been achieved by a suited analysis of GPR images exploiting the spatio-temporal correlation properties of the received signal. Although a generalization is not reliable, this study shows that an automatic GPR-based evaluation of subgrade soil characteristics is feasible.