A Layer Tracking Method for Ice Thickness Detection Based on GPR Mounted on the UAV

Located in the high-latitude part of China, the Songhua River freezes up in winter and thaws in spring. The abundant water volume may cause serious ice flood. So regular detection of the ice thickness is significant for the early warning of the related disasters. In this paper, to overcome the security and portability issues in the process of ice information acquisition, an ice thickness detection hardware system based on the ground penetrating radar (GPR) acquisition device mounted on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is adopted. A novel layer tracking method is proposed to automatically track the ice layer. The experimental results show that the proposed method can handle the data collected by the UAV with large fluctuation effectively, performing better than the correlation detection method in the auto ice layer tracking, and ice thickness can be detected accurately and quickly.