Estimation of subsurface cylindrical object properties from GPR full-waveform inversion

Precise radius estimation is of high interest for rebar and pipe characterization but very challenging. In this work, we present a novel 3D frequency-domain full-waveform inversion (FWI) approach with which the geometrical information of subsurface cylindrical objects and the dielectric properties of the penetrating medium are simultaneously extracted from ground penetrating radar (GPR) data. The presented FWI strategy optimizes and updates phase- and amplitude-related model parameters sequentially. The forward modeling step in FWI is accomplished by using gprMax3D. The Shuffled Complex Evolution (SCE) strategy is employed for the optimization procedure. The experiment with synthetic data has provided a precise reconstruction of the initial model.