A Portable Penetrating Radar System for 3D Wall Attribution Inversion

The wall-penetrating radar is a noncontact sensing technology that uses electromagnetic waves to penetrate buildings and detect concealed structures. The current two-dimensional (2-D) detection systems have difficulty in identifying wall materials. In this article, a novel portable penetration radar system for wall attribution inversion is proposed. The system is equipped with a horizontally distributed 8T8R antenna array and achieves 3-D detection of walls through unidirectional data accumulation. It integrates the proposed 2.5-layer approximate model and the fully connected neural network to enable signal penetration loss estimation and material identification. The system features an integrated probe and observation unit, making deployment simple and efficient. Experiments are conducted to validate the proposed system’s ability in wall attribution inversion. The material identification accuracy reaches 92%, and the penetration loss estimation error is less than 1.5 dB. The experiment results demonstrate the system’s significant potential in applications such as renovation of old buildings and archaeological investigations.