Measuring soil layer thickness in land rearrangement with GPR data

摘要

Accurate measurement of soil layer thickness by GPR (ground penetrating radar) is of great importance for overlay design and quality control/quality assurance for land rearrangement projects. Soil layer detection is complex because of multiple reflections and high attenuation for electromagnetic (EM) waves propagating in the soil media. This paper proposes a novel data processing method based on the reflection and refraction of the EM waves to improve the measurement accuracy. A cross-correlation sequence is introduced to align the traces, and the effects of random noise are reduced by using a forwards and backwards filtering procedure without phase delay. Additionally, the homomorphic deconvolution, namely the power cepstrum, is employed to deconvolve GPR data and, thus, to enhance its interface reflection. The results of the verification test show that the measurement can achieve high accuracy, with an error less than 10%, and the measurement performance is greatly improved by using the new method. Finally, a contour map of the research area is generated automatically for quality detection and quality control guidance.