Advanced imaging for down-looking contactless GPR systems

An advanced imaging procedure for Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) operating in contactless configuration, i.e., when data are collected at a certain distance from the air-soil interface, is proposed in this contribution. The algorithm is based on an advanced implementation of a microwave tomographic approach recently proposed by the authors, which is capable of accounting for the near-field distribution generated by the transmitting antenna. Numerical data are obtained by means of a full-wave solution of the direct scattering problem, suitably implementing a realistic system on a commercial code. Both metallic and dielectric canonical objects can be considered to compare the performances of the proposed algorithm with respect to more conventional procedures based on simplifying hypotheses.