PRACTICAL ALGORITHMS TO FOCUS B-SCAN GPR IMAGES: THEORY AND APPLICATION TO REAL DATA

It is well known in B-scan ground penetrating radar (GPR) imagery that the underground scatterers generally exhibit defocused, hyperbolic characteristics. This is mainly due to the data collection scheme and the finite beam width of the main lobe of the GPR antenna. To invert this undesirable effect and obtain focused images, various migration or focusing algorithms have been developed. In this paper, we survey the performance of our recent focusing algorithms, namely; hyperbolic summation (HS) and frequency-wavenumber (w-k) based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) focusing. The practical usage of these focusing methods were tested and examined on both simulated and measured GPR data of various buried targets. The simulation data set is obtained by a physical optics shooting and bouncing ray (PO-SBR) technique code. Measurements were taken by a stepped frequency continuous wave (SFCW) radar set-up. Scattered C-band field data were measured from a laboratory sand box and from outdoor soil environment. The proposed focusing methods were then applied to the B-scan GPR images to enhance the resolution quality within these images. The resultant GPR images obtained with the proposed algorithms demonstrate enhanced lateral resolutions.