Innovative Approaches to GPR Detection of Underground Objects

Over the last 2 decades, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology has offered the promise of achieving a breakthrough in the remote sensing of underground targets. Despite high expectations and definite advances, however, the full promise of GPR remains to be fulfilled. The proposed project is an effort to apply an innovative GPR technique and specialized signal processing to achieve a significant advance in GPR performance. The innovative GPR technique uses a spotlight mode SAR to achieve more energy on subsurface targets. The specialized processing technique involves fully coherent signal processing and customization of the SAR matched-filter by using a priori knowledge of target scattering characteristics. The intent of the spotlight mode SAR and specialized signal processing is to increase the processed signal gain of the GPR system to enhance detection and target recogni- tion of subsurface targets. The Phase I effort will leverage an existing instrumentation GPR owned by Mirage Systems to perform an experiment to quantify the benefits of the innovative GPR approach and specialized processing. The objectives of the Phase I effort are to establish the feasibility of the proposed techniques, quantify the processing benefits, and specify processor requirements for practical GPR systems. Anticipated Benefits/Potential Applications - Potential national security benefits of this R&D include enhanced GPR detection and recognition of buried targets such as mines, ordnance, arms/drug caches, cross-border tunnels, bunkers, and nuclear/toxic waste containers. Potential commercial applications are within the environmental and construction industries by providing GPR products that can perform safe, low cost subsurface site surveys required prior to starting remediation or construction activities.