Imaging Study for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Mounted Ground-Penetrating Radar: Part 1 - Methodology and Analytic Formulation

摘要

This report is the first part of an investigation of possible configurations for a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) system installed on a small unmanned aerial vehicle platform and used for buried target imaging. After discussing the advantages of this type of platform compared with existing designs, we develop the tools needed to analyze the imaging performance of the proposed system. This is done primarily by simulating the point spread function (PSF) of the system working in either down-looking or side-looking configuration and horizontal-horizontal or vertical-vertical polarization. The current work lays the theoretical foundations and describes the methodology employed in the GPR imaging systems performance analysis, discussing the calculation of the point target response, the formulation of the imaging algorithm, and the equations employed in the PSF numeric models.