A Modeling Method for Quasi-monostatic Stepped Frequency Ground Penetrating Radar

Abstract

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a widely used non-destructive testing tool. Constructing an appropriate forward model is crucial for GPR to perform a full-waveform inversion of layered media. In this paper, a forward model for the quasi-monostatic Stepped-Frequency GPR (SFGPR) is proposed. In the model, the GPR and its interaction with the layered medium are represented as a linear equation in which the effects of the antennas are represented by a set of frequency-dependent transfer functions. To verify the accuracy of the proposed model, the authors constructed a quasi-monostatic SFGPR in a laboratory condition and performed a full-waveform inversion of the measurement signals of plasterboard and woodblock with known thickness. In the inversion results, the thickness estimation errors of the plasterboard and woodblock are not more than 0.3 mm, indicating that the proposed forward model has a very high accuracy. The inversion performances of the quasi-monostatic and monostatic SFGPR are further compared for the layered medium constructed with plasterboard and woodblock, which has a small permittivity difference. The results show that the quasi-monostatic SFGPR can obtain more accurate inversion parameters. By estimating the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of the reflected signal from the interface, it is found that the SNR obtained by the quasimonostatic configuration is 10 dB higher than that of the monostatic; therefore, the quasi-monostatic GPR has the better inversion performance.

Keywords

• Forward model
• Stepped-Frequency Ground Penetrating Radar (SFGPR)
• Quasi mono-static
• Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)
• Full-waveform inversion