A localization method for concealed cracks in the road base based on ground penetrating radar

Abstract

Phenomenon of concealed cracks is one of the familiar failures in the road base. Accurate concealed crack localization of the road base using ground penetrating radar still suffers from some limitations. To accurately locate the concealed cracks in the road base, an effective concealed crack localization method based on ground penetrating radar is proposed in this article: first, continuous ground penetrating radar scanning and manual point-by-point detection are performed to determine the location of the concealed crack roughly; then the ground penetrating radar–based ellipse method and an improved data processor based on MATLAB are used for processing the data to determine the accurate location of the concealed crack. The proposed method is experimentally validated using a rectangle concrete block with a concealed crack, and the results of the proposed method are compared with that of the previous method. All results indicate that the proposed method can be used to locate concealed cracks fast and well; moreover, the localization accuracy of the proposed method is obviously higher than the previous method; all these lay a good foundation for engineering applications.