The Tomographic Approach to Ground-Penetrating Radar for Underground Exploration and Monitoring: A More User-Friendly and Unconventional Method for Subsurface Investigation

Underground exploration and characterization via nondestructive imaging is of great interest in the modern scientific community [1]. The reason for such enthusiasm is related to the methodology?s wide range of applications, which span from civil engineering to the archaeological and forensic fields and to planetary exploration. In this framework, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is becoming one of the leading technologies because of its flexibility and ease of application. However, standard GPR provides a user-dependent map, known as a radargram, of underground and subsurface targets, the interpretation of which requires strong human expertise and does not allow for inferences about the nature of the buried targets, unless some a priori information is available.