Improvement of GPR-SAR Imaging by Considering the Field Radiated by the GPR Antennas

Ground penetrating radar - synthetic aperture radar (GPR-SAR) imaging algorithms have been widely used for the detection of buried targets as they can retrieve accurate images of the subsoil while keeping simplicity (and thus, computational cost) affordable. These algorithms can be improved by including the field radiated by the antennas of the GPR system, which can be characterized using an equivalent source model. This is of special interest in the case of GPR antennas with large phase center variation, where the application of GPR-SAR processing can be challenging. This contribution shows an application example of GPR-SAR imaging for buried targets detection using a Fourier-based imaging algorithm that considers the field radiated by the transmitting and receiving logarithmic periodic antennas (LPAs) of a portable GPR system.