Abstract
Spatial imaging of ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurement data is a difficult computational problem that is time consuming and requires substantial memory resources. The complexity of the problem increases when the measurements are performed on an irregular grid. Such grid irregularities are typical for handheld or flying GPR systems. In this paper, a fast and efficient method of GPR data imaging based on radial basis functions is described. A compactly supported modified Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) and a hierarchical approximation method were used for computation. The approximation was performed in multiple layers with decreasing approximation radius, where in successive layers, increasingly finer details of the imaging were exposed. The proposed method provides high flexibility and accuracy of approximation with a computational cost of N·log (N) for model building and N·M for function evaluation, where N is the number of measurement points and M is the number of approximation centres. The method also allows for the control smoothing of measurement noise. The computation of one high-quality imaging using 5000 measurement points utilises about 5 s on an Intel Core i5-7200U CPU 2.5 GHz, 8 GB RAM computer. Such short time enables real-time image processing during field measurements.
Subject
Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Computer Networks and Communications,Hardware and Architecture,Signal Processing,Control and Systems Engineering