Radar Database Collected over Artificial Debonding Pavement Structures During APT at the IFSTTAR’s Fatigue Carrousel

Data interpretation over disbonded pavement structures still remains an open problem for the scientific community. In this paper, the details of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) database, collected over artificial disbonded areas during an accelerated pavement testing at IFSTTAR’s carrousel, are presented. The database will be made available to the scientific communities. It may serve as a reference benchmark for both developing and testing the performance of various processing techniques for either interface detection and characterization, or monitoring purposes. In practice, GPR data have been collected over three artificial defects (tack-free, geotextile and sand-based), which were embedded between the top and the base layers. The data collection was organized in a two-stage experiments and covers the full life-cycle of the pavement structure. During the first stage that took place in 2012–13, data were collected at each of 10k, 50k, 100k, 200k, 250k and 300k loading cycles. The second measurement campaign was performed in 2019 and lasted up to 720k loading cycles. The database merges two types of existing radar technologies and configurations. Two stepped-frequency radar with 1.5 and 4.5 GHz as center frequency and two impulse radar systems, working at 2.6 and 1.5 GHz, were tested during this experiment.