A Cable-Mapping Algorithm Based on Ground-Penetrating Radar

Abstract

The demand for mapping the buried cables is increasing dramatically with the rapid expansion of urban area, but there are few specific procedures and approaches to map underground cables without disturbing the normal electricity supply. In this letter, a cable-mapping approach based on the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is proposed, which consists of two parts. First, the parallel scan lines are established along which the GPR is moved to obtain the B-scan images; the hyperbolic shapes on these obtained images are identified and fitted; and the locations and depths of the detected sample points of the buried cables could be derived from these hyperbolas. Then, due to different terrain and surrounding obstacles, as well as the use of pipe-jacking technology, <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> the underground cables may not be straight. The detected points are interpolated by a three-dimensional spline interpolation algorithm to obtain a smooth 3-D curve with location and depth information. Compared with the 2-D model, the 3-D curve could visualize the direction of buried cables more intuitively. Also, in comparison with other interpolation algorithms, the error caused by the proposed interpolation is minimized on the chosen data sets. Experiments on real-world data sets are conducted, and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Pipe-jacking is a trenchless technology for buried utilities [1].