3D Imaging of Buried Dielectric Targets with a Tomographic Microwave Approach Applied to GPR Synthetic Data

Effective diagnostics with ground penetrating radar (GPR) is strongly dependent on the amount and quality of available data as well as on the efficiency of the adopted imaging procedure. In this frame, the aim of the present work is to investigate the capability of a typical GPR system placed at a ground interface to derive three-dimensional (3D) information on the features of buried dielectric targets (location, dimension, and shape). The scatterers can have size comparable to the resolution limits and can be placed in the shallow subsurface in the antenna near field. Referring to canonical multimonostatic configurations, the forward scattering problem is analyzed first, obtaining a variety of synthetic GPR traces and radargrams by means of a customized implementation of an electromagnetic CAD tool. By employing these numerical data, a full 3D frequency-domain microwave tomographic approach, specifically designed for the inversion problem at hand, is applied to tackle the imaging process. The method is tested here by considering various scatterers, with different shapes and dielectric contrasts. The selected tomographic results illustrate the aptitude of the proposed approach to recover the fundamental features of the targets even with critical GPR settings.