VMD analysis of RF-tagged buried pipes for GPR applications

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is an efficient tool for the detection of underground objects. However, due to electromagnetic attenuation and scattering effects, the detection and identification of the buried objects are often difficult. Radio-Frequency (RF) tagging of the buried pipes and cables is a novel approach to tackle these problems, and generally the enhanced response from the RF tags in the traditional GPR B-Scan images need to be extracted through joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA). Traditional TFA techniques, such as the short-time Fourier transform, S transform, and wavelet transform, suffer poor time-frequency resolution. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate to significantly increase the time-frequency resolution of the RF tags by implementing the variational mode composition (VMD) method which is recently introduced for geophysical prospecting. Our experimental demonstration suggests that VMD shows great potentials for the accurate identification and mapping of the RF tagged buried infrastructure.