Abstract
Although ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is effective to detect shallow-buried objects, it still needs more effort for the application to investigate a buried water utility infrastructure. Edge detection is a well-known image processing technique that may improve the resolution of GPR images. In this study, we briefly review the theory of edge detection and discuss several popular edge detectors as examples, and then apply an enhanced edge detecting method to GPR data processing. This method integrates the multidimensional ensemble empirical mode decomposition (MDEEMD) algorithm into standard edge detecting filters. MDEEMD is implemented mainly for data reconstruction to increase the signal-to-noise ratio before edge detecting. A quantitative marginal spectrum analysis is employed to support the data reconstruction and facilitate the final data interpretation. The results of the numerical model study followed by a field example suggest that the MDEEMD edge detector is a competent method for processing and interpreting GPR data of a buried hot spring well, which cannot be efficiently handled by conventional techniques. Moreover, the proposed method should be readily considered a vital tool for processing other kinds of buried water utility infrastructures.
Highlights
Accepted: 5 November 2021The maintenance of buried water utility infrastructure is a major issue for water companies
We have shown that the use of the multidimensional ensemble empirical mode decomposition (MDEEMD) data reconstruction technique can greatly improve the result of edge detecting in the target mapping of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data of a buried hot spring well survey
MDEEMD is a data-driven nonlinear and nonstationary multidimensional data processing method that has been successfully applied to various fields of study before we applied it to the investigation of a buried water utility infrastructure
Summary
Accepted: 5 November 2021The maintenance of buried water utility infrastructure is a major issue for water companies. Due to the material deterioration over time and occasional accidents, a routine inspection of buried assets is required. This task requires the aid of nondestructive and noninvasive techniques, and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the methods of this kind [1]. A variety of data processing techniques have been proposed to improve the accuracy of GPR imaging [2,3,4,5,6]. Edge detection is a technique formerly used by computer engineers in the analysis of images to outline the essential information of the data [7,8,9]. In the years since the edge detection technique was proposed in the
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