Continuous pavement profiling with ground-penetrating radar

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) monostatic ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been proven to be very useful in road and highway pavement profiling. Pavement profiling involves estimating the thickness and permittivity of each underground layer, which can be done through layer stripping inversion, using efficient time-delay-estimation algorithms. In monostatic GPR applications, time-delay estimation is routinely performed on a scan-by-scan basis. The authors first propose a multi-scan data model for the continuous survey, by taking into account the vertical motion of moving vehicles as well as the lateral continuity of echoes arising from a multilayered media along the scan direction. Then a new algorithm, referred to as MCPEG (motion compensation and parameter estimation for GPR), is presented for simultaneous motion compensation and time-delay estimation. MCPEG outperforms the conventional scan-by-scan estimation approach in terms of both computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. Numerical and experimental examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm.