Singular-value Gain Compensation: Robust and efficient GPR preprocessing method enhancing zero-shot underground object segmentation by Segment-Anything Model

This paper introduces Singular-value Gain Compensation (SGC), a robust preprocessing method for Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) that integrates Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Time Gain Compensation (TGC). SGC effectively enhances the signal-to-noise ratio while maintaining weak signal integrity, facilitating the application of pretrained zero-shot segmentation models. Through extensive evaluations using simulated and real-world data, SGC demonstrates superior performance in image quality and segmentation accuracy compared to traditional methods, showing the improvements of +3.1 dB in PSNR and 23% in segmentation’s IoU in complex simulated scenarios. It also shows 20% and 14% improvements in pipe and void segmentations on real-world data. Additionally, SGC is computationally efficient, reducing both time and memory requirements, making it practical for large-scale infrastructure assessments. The method’s efficacy in enhancing GPR image analysis without extensive computational resources marks a significant advancement in ground penetrating radar preprocessing and provide more possibilities for future research in the downstream tasks combining with recent deep learning models.