Contactless Microwave Tomography via MIMO GPR

This letter presents an imaging approach for multiple input-multiple output ground penetrating radar (MIMO GPR) systems working in down-looking contactless mode. The approach exploits a linear approximation of the scattering phenomenon and is based on a ray-based propagation model, which takes into account the presence of the air-soil interface. Accordingly, the interface reflection point (IRP) concept is extended to the case of MIMO GPR. The proposed approach performs the imaging in the 2-D scalar case and applies the truncated singular value decomposition regularization scheme to perform the inversion. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed by processing synthetic and real data. The real data are referred to the lunar soil and have been collected by means of the Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar (LRPR), installed on the Chang'E-5 (CE-5) lander.