PUMA Applied to Time Delay Estimation for Processing GPR Data over Debonded Pavement Structures

Abstract

In this paper, principal-singular-vector utilization for modal analysis (PUMA) was adapted to perform time delay estimation on ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data by taking into account the shape of the transmitted GPR signal. The super-resolution capability of PUMA was used to separate overlapping backscattered echoes from a layered pavement structure with some embedded debondings. The well-known root-MUSIC algorithm was selected as a benchmark for performance assessment. The simulation results showed that the proposed PUMA performs very well, especially in the case where the sources are totally coherent, and it requires much less computational time than the root-MUSIC algorithm.

Keywords

• ground-penetrating radar (GPR)
• nondestructive testing
• signal processing
• time delay estimation (TDE)
• pavement monitoring
• PUMA