Airborne ground penetrating radar imaging of buried targets: A tomographic approach

In several applications, the demand for devices capable to reliably investigate the subsurface features of wide areas engenders an increasing interest in the development of airborne ground penetrating radar systems and of the relevant imaging strategies. With respect to this framework, in this communication we describe a tomographic inversion strategy to tackle the imaging problem in an airborne multimonostatic measurement configuration and give a preliminary assessment of the achievable reconstruction capabilities against synthetic data.

I. Introduction

Nowadays, ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a technology widely adopted in many contexts, ranging from geology to archeology, homeland security and mining exploration. In particular, since in these applications the surveys are mostly carried out in situ and in the proximity of the soil's surface, in order to detect, locate and identify buried targets or anomalies, typical GPR systems exploit ground-based vehicles or hand towed devices. On the other hand, when wide areas or inaccessible regions have to be investigated, by possibly keeping the measurement time low and the data-collection density high, the most suitable technical solution is that of considering GPR systems installed on helicopters or spotter plane.