Minimizing Timing Jitter’s Impact on Ground-Penetrating Radar Array Coupling Signals

This article presents a novel investigation into the effect of receiver timing jitter on the quality of imaging of ground-penetrating radar systems. We explicitly show the impact of timing jitter throughout an entire example processing pipeline. The process of coupling removal in systems whose receivers have a random Gaussian-distributed jitter with a high standard deviation leaves randomly distributed residue in the radar image. This residue, called jitter-induced coupling noise, extends even into the expected target domain which may cause false alarms. This residue approximately follows a sum of Gaussian and Gamma distributions based on the higher order derivatives of the coupling signal. Once migrated to create an image, the coupling residue is best described by a Weibull distribution. We show that simple filtering does not remove enough residue and propose two preventative design specifications called the linear slope and migrated probability specifications. Antenna and system designers should use these specifications to assess the true severity of coupling signals in a given jitter environment.