Detection and Location of Buried Infrastructures Using Ground Penetrating Radar

Abstract

This article proposes an approach to improve the deployment of ground penetrating radar (GPR) in the field to detected and locate urban infrastructures. It consists of exploiting geographic data layers, database management systems, and a WebGIS, allowing users to handle GPR data within a georeferenced environment is developed based on a platform called GVX, providing users with four features, being (1) map integration, (2) geo-annotations and points of interest interaction, (3) radargram georeferencing, and (4) georeferenced slice visualization. Experiments with two categories of users, expert and non-expert GPR practitioners, have been performed. Based on the users' evaluation, the approach is valuable and can significantly improve GPR deployment. It helps users when discovering unmapped underground objects, delimiting the survey area, and interpreting GPR complex datasets. Overall, the approach optimized time and facilitated the spatial notion between GPR profiles and 3D meshes with map resources, allowing users to produce reliable maps, conforming to geospatial standards (CityGML).