Moderately rough surface underground imaging via short-pulse quasi-ray Gaussian beams

Abstract

An adaptive framework is presented for ultra-wideband ground penetrating radar imaging of shallow-buried low-contrast dielectric objects in the presence of a moderately rough air-soil interface. The proposed approach works with sparse data and relies on recently developed Gabor-based narrow-waisted quasi-ray Gaussian beam algorithms as fast forward scattering predictive models. First, a nonlinear inverse scattering problem is solved to estimate the unknown coarse-scale roughness profile. This sets the stage for adaptive compensation of clutter-induced distortion in the underground imaging problem, which is linearized via Born approximation and subsequently solved via various pixel-based and object-based techniques. Numerical simulations are presented to assess accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency for various calibrated ranges of problem parameters. The proposed approach has potential applications to antipersonnel land mine remediation.