Two-Dimensional Reverse Time Migration for Multi-Input Multi-Output System by Shot Correlation Method with Noise Effect

In this paper, we propose a shot correlation reverse time migration (SC-RTM) method for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) ground penetrating radar (GPR) imaging to improve image contrast. In GPR applications, noise is unavoidable in radar echo signals and can cause artifacts in the subsurface reconstructed image. Since in general the correlation among noise signals is weaker than that in target signals, a shot correlation image operator is proposed to integrate all shot images and arrive at the final reconstructed image with artifacts suppression and resolution improvement. In numerical experiments, to test the performance of artifacts suppression, we add different noise levels in the synthetic GPR data. It is shown that the noise is effectively suppressed and the contrast between targets and artifacts is improved in reconstructed images of the SC-RTM method by more than 15 dB. The measured MIMO GPR echo signals with significant noises are successfully processed by the SC-RTM method to yield high contrast subsurface images.