GPR Water Pipe Monitoring and Leaks Characterization: A Differential Microwave Tomography Approach

Water is an essential natural resource for assuring life and its effective usage and distribution is a key issue made more and more relevant by climate changes. This framework supports the development and employment of technological solutions devoted to improve water management through a growth of the efficiency of the network and distribution systems. In this frame, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) deserves attention being a portable, low-cost, non-invasive and high reliability technology suitable for water pipe monitoring and leak detection. Accordingly, the chapter reviews advantages and limits featuring GPR. Moreover, it proposes a data processing approach to improve GPR imaging and provides a proof of concepts assessing its reconstruction capability preliminarily.