Detection of Underground Anomalies Using Analysis of Ground Penetrating Radar Attribute

Abstract

Need of specifying underground construction works for supporting further tasks as maintenance, repairing, or setting up new underground structures. For these needs, ground penetrating radar, one of the efficient geophysical methods, can bring high-resolution and quick underground image revealing existence of both natural and artificial anomalies. Its fixed receiver-transmitter antennas setting as constant offset is commonly used in urban areas. Conventionally, hyperbolae events are crucial indicator for scattering objects as kinds of pipes, water drainage system, and concrete building structures as well as sink holes. Calculation of their depths and sizes requires migration analysis with the environment velocity. Migrated sections with different velocity show different chaos degrees of transformation from a hyperbola diffraction curve to its focused area. We have researched diagrams of different Ground Penetrating Radar attributes as energy, entropy, and varimax dependent on two variables, velocity and window zone covering diffraction events from a set of synthetic data and real data, in specifying the environment velocity. We have developed a novel technique for evaluation of the ground velocity and object’s size by combination of the new varimax diagram and the Kirchhoff migration method. The technique can define contribution of diffracted ground penetrating radar waves for building the diagram after removing the reflection contribution. The synthetic datasets consist of different random background noise levels and expressions of different-sized circular and rectangular pipes. The real data is measured for detecting two underground gas pipes in Ba Ria – Vung Tau province, Vietnam.