Imaging the internal structure of trunks via multiscale phase inversion of ground-penetrating radar data

Abstract

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a geophysical technique widely used in near-surface noninvasive detecting. It has the ability to obtain a high-resolution internal structure of living tree trunks. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has been widely used to reconstruct the dielectric constant and conductivity distribution for crosswell applications. However, in some cases, the amplitude information is not reliable due to the antenna coupling, radiation pattern, and other effects. We have developed a multiscale phase inversion (MPI) method, which largely matches the phase information by normalizing the magnitude spectrum; in addition, a natural multiscale approach by integrating the input data with different times is implemented to partly mitigate the local minimal problem. Two synthetic GPR data sets generated from a healthy oak tree trunk and from a decayed trunk are tested by MPI and FWI. A field GPR data set consisting of 30 common-shot GPR data is acquired on a standing white oak tree ( Quercus alba); the MPI and FWI methods are used to reconstruct the dielectric constant distribution of the tree cross section. Results indicate that MPI has more tolerance to the starting model, noise level, and source wavelet. It can provide a more accurate image of the dielectric constant distribution compared to the conventional FWI.