An Efficient Ray Tracing Based Method of Ground Penetrating Radar Simulation for Dispersive Media

Abstract

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a non-destructive technique that employs electromagnetic waves to map subsurface structures. An effective simulation method is essential for GPR system design and signal processing. In this paper, a simulation method of GPR is proposed for dispersive media that is usually encountered in GPR applications. The behavior of dispersive media is simulated in our method by filtering the transmitted signal of GPR with an approximation of the system transfer function that is obtained by interpolating the values of the system transfer function evaluated at different frequencies, each of which is acquired by simulating GPR using the existing ray tracing based method of GPR simulation for non-dispersive media with a mono-frequency signal of the corresponding frequency as its transmitted signal. The accuracy and efficiency of our method were validated by comparing the experimental results of our method to those of the Frequency-Dependent Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FD-FDTD) method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can simulate GPR for dispersive media with acceptable accuracy consuming much less running time than the FD-FDTD method for GPR simulation for dispersive media.