Peak detection of GPR data with lifting wavelet transform (LWT)

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a technique based on sending electromagnetic (EM) waves through the structure and then recording the reflected signals, which present at dielectric discontinuities into the structure. Peak detection of GPR data is important for the diagnosis of ground infrastructures. This paper describes the application of lifting wavelet transform (LWT) to detect peaks in GPR signals. These peaks are used to calculate the two-way travel times t_i of the EM waves between the antenna and the layers i. Then distances d_i are calculated from these times. The measured values (distances) are compared with the manually determined values. The performance of peak detection with Lifting Wavelet Transform was evaluated by computing the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The results clearly indicate that this method is perfectly able to estimate thickness within 14.27%, mean average error rate which justifies and validates the model used.