Recent advances in high-resolution Ground Penetrating Radar on board an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In this contribution, a methodology to process the measurements gathered with a novel subsurface imaging system is presented. This system is based on mounting a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) on board an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Among other advantages, the system does not need to be in contact with the soil, which is particularly useful for detecting dangerous objects (e.g., landmines). However, there are still several challenges that should be faced, such as speeding up the measurements processing so as to bring it closer to real-time operation. In this sense, two different focusing methods are applied to several in-flight measurements to generate a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar image by coherently combining all the measurements. This coherent combination is possible due to the use of a high accuracy positioning system. Both focusing methods are compared in terms of image quality and computational time for detecting metallic and dielectric targets.