SREMI: Super-resolution electromagnetic imaging with single-channel ground-penetrating radar

Abstract

High-resolution near-surface imaging has important applications in civil engineering, infrastructure inspection, military threat detection, geological characterization, and lunar and planetary exploration. Zero-offset, single-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) imaging is an established technique for near-surface target imaging and sensing but often suffers from low spatial resolution and imaging artifacts, especially of deep structures. In response, we formulate the GPR imaging as a dual-sparsity optimization problem, and develop a super-resolution electromagnetic imaging method based on a fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm. We develop our GPR imaging method in the framework of electromagnetic exploding-reflectors simulation theory, therefore the imaging method is computationally efficient. We demonstrate through synthetic and field data examples that our method can produce sharper, more reliable images with fewer artifacts compared with single-pass reverse-time migration GPR method, thus leading to improved near-surface interpretation and object identification.