Clutter Modeling for Ground-Penetrating Radar Measurements in Heterogeneous Soils

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) measurement and its interpretation/analysis are challenging when soil is heterogeneous. Soil heterogeneity causes unwanted reflections (i.e., clutter) that disturb reflections from objects of interest. Thorough investigations on soil heterogeneity and clutter are important in order to understand the influence on GPR and assess the performance. In order to observe the influence of heterogeneous soil, an irrigation test was carried out and GPR data were collected after the irrigation and while the distribution of soil water content varied. The correlation length and variability of the dielectric constant of soil were determined by geostatistical analyses of the GPR data. These two parameters were built into a simple model and the Mie solution was theoretically calculated. From this, the power of the backscattered field due to soil heterogeneity was modeled. The results were in agreement with the power of the clutter extracted from the GPR data. Therefore, clutter can be predicted from soil heterogeneity with a simple model using the Mie solution. Furthermore, the result exhibits that scattering by heterogeneous soil is dominated by Mie scattering, rather than Rayleigh scattering, in the studied frequency range.

[1]  W. Steen.  Absorption and Scattering of Light by Small Particles , 1999 .

[2]  D. Daniels.  Ground Penetrating Radar , 2005 .

[3]  Nada Milisavljevic,et al.  Prediction of the effects of soil and target properties on the antipersonnel landmine detection performance of ground-penetrating radar: A Colombian case study , 2007 .

[4]  Larry W. Lake,et al.  A moving window semivariance estimator , 1994 .

[5]  F. Roth,et al.  Convolutional Models for Landmine Identification with Ground Penetrating Radar , 2004 .

[6]  R. Olea.  Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation By Pierre Goovaerts, Oxford University Press, Applied Geostatistics Series, 1997, 483 p., hardcover, $65 (U.S.), ISBN 0-19-511538-4 , 1999 .

[7]  Rosemary Knight,et al.  GEOSTATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR DATA : A MEANS OF DESCRIBING SPATIAL VARIATION IN THE SUBSURFACE , 1998 .

[8]  Clayton V. Deutsch,et al.  GSLIB: Geostatistical Software Library and User's Guide , 1993 .

[9]  Harry M. Jol,et al.  The role of ground penetrating radar and geostatistics in reservoir description , 1997 .

[10]  Harry M. Jol,et al.  A comparison of the correlation structure in GPR images of deltaic and barrier‐spit depositional environments , 2000 .

[11]  Akira Ishimaru,et al.  Wave propagation and scattering in random media , 1997 .

[12]  Michael Edward Hohn,et al.  An Introduction to Applied Geostatistics: by Edward H. Isaaks and R. Mohan Srivastava, 1989, Oxford University Press, New York, 561 p., ISBN 0-19-505012-6, ISBN 0-19-505013-4 (paperback), $55.00 cloth, $35.00 paper (US) , 1991 .

[13]  Harry M. Jol,et al.  Ground penetrating radar : theory and applications , 2009 .

[14]  A. P. Annan,et al.  Electromagnetic determination of soil water content: Measurements in coaxial transmission lines , 1980 .

[15]  Joseph N. Wilson,et al.  An Investigation of Using the Spectral Characteristics From Ground Penetrating Radar for Landmine/Clutter Discrimination , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[16]  Jan Igel,et al.  The Small-Scale Variability of Electrical Soil Properties − Influence on GPR Measurements , 2008 .

[17]  K. Holliger,et al.  Effects of fractal fluctuations in topographic relief, permittivity and conductivity on ground‐penetrating radar antenna radiation , 2003 .

[18]  D. Daniels.  EM Detection of Concealed Targets , 2009 .