Hydro-Electromagnetic Properties in Ground Penetrating Radar Field Target Detection Studies

摘要

Recent work in context-dependent processing for buried threat detection has revealed the potential of exploiting correlatedenvironmental parameters in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) imaging, detection and discrimination, as well as data fusionapproaches. In order to fully understand the physical phenomenology and develop performance predictions, we need tocorrelate measurable environmental parameters to GPR performance. We focus on hydro-meteorological andhydrogeologic properties such as temperature, humidity, soil water matric potential, soil water content, and sedimentdensity and texture to understand the hydrogeophysical relationships and methods to incorporate them into optimalexperimental design and data processing. Varying levels of data and information quality are assessed to quantify thesensitivity of GPR acquisition and processing methods to environmental contextual information. Both numerical modelingand experimental data collection are used to evaluate soil water controls on three-dimensional electromagnetic wavepropagation. We present the analysis of experimental data collected in a new instrumented test bed facility constructedfor assessing various configurations of air- or ground-coupled GPR systems. We assess factors such volume integrationscale, measurement scaling and accuracy of the various hydro-electromagnetic sensing methods in terms of understandingmulti-static radar angular illumination and imaging performance.