Ground and aerial subsurface radar imaging via Microwave Tomography

The interest in non-destructive surveys of natural and anthropic environments makes subsurface radar imaging an ever-green research topic and the current trend concerns the design of technological solutions conjugating the potentialities of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems with those of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). In this frame, Microwave Tomography (MWT) deserves attention because it allows facing the imaging by using the same mathematical tools regardless of the observation platform mounting the radar. This paper reviews the formulation of GPR imaging as a linear inverse scattering problem and discusses how the same formal equation can be specified to process data collected by ground or UAV-based systems. Specifically, the paper shows that subsurface imaging from UAV GPR data is faced with the same computational complexity encountered when standard on ground measurements are processed. Results referred to an experiment carried out in controlled conditions are provided as a proof of concept.