Accuracy evaluation of traffic-speed coreless GPR techniques in pavement layer thickness estimation

Ground Penetrating Radar traffic-speed surveys enable the collection of useful data about the condition of the road, in particular giving information about the thickness of pavement materials. Having a reliable and accurate method to “self-calibrate” the GPR data, and thus avoiding the necessity to collect cores, would transform the GPR method into a fully traffic-speed technique that provides a continuous measure of the layer thickness from post-processed data significantly improving the efficiency of this method. In this work, layer thickness estimation obtained with two different self-calibrating techniques and based on traffic-speed data, have been compared with the real core values, in order to evaluate the accuracy of these “coreless” GPR methods.