Abstract
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is widely applied for civil engineering, such as for building health assessments or pavement inspections. In these applications, information on the material permittivity is important for internal structure inspection and characterization. However, in the case of a large building area, a lightweight, fast and effective permittivity measurement technique is required. In addition, the estimation method for different GPR types and range configurations must be generalized for adaptability and wide applicability. This paper proposes a material permittivity estimation technique for air-coupled GPR that effectively works for mobile and large observation missions. The method employs the peak ratio of analytic representation signals between the antenna direct coupling and the material surface reflection. An interpolation algorithm is applied to the reference characteristic curves generated by the finite-difference time-domain technique to adapt the change in radar range configuration. The proposed method has been tested to estimate the permittivity in three different construction materials and measure two metal rebar depths inside reinforced concrete. The experimental results show that the method works with acceptable accuracy. Therefore, the method is sufficiently promising to be utilized in real applications, especially those that require adaptability and mobility, such as ground and aerial vehicle-based radar systems.
Highlights
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a mature nondestructive testing and evaluation technology that is mostly used to explore the subsurface of objects [1]
SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL SETUP To determine the relationship between analytic peak ratio and material permittivity, we employed synthetic data generated by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD)-based software for an electromagnetic propagation model, gprMax [31]
The method employs the ratio of the analytic representation signal between antenna direct coupling and material surface reflection
Summary
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a mature nondestructive testing and evaluation technology that is mostly used to explore the subsurface of objects [1]. Various material permittivity estimation methods have been proposed that appear promising in their application Most of those techniques are based on the time domain or frequency domain analysis of the surface propagation waves that are detected by ground-coupled type GPRs [10,11,12,13,14]. A common midpoint-based method was proposed in [24,25], but those methods require multiple antenna/radar or multiple ranges of measurements, which makes application complicated Another estimation that applies to the GPR of this type was proposed in [26,27]. The proposed method can estimate the permittivity with high accuracy, but it requires a large computation time for full-wave inversion According to this background, this paper proposes a new and relatively simple signal processing technique to estimate the material permittivity in air-coupled radar systems.
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