Investigating Key Techniques to Leverage the Functionality of Ground/Wall Penetrating Radar

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been extensively utilized as a highly efficient and non-destructive testing method for infrastructure evaluation, such as highway rebar detection, bridge decks inspection, asphalt pavement monitoring, underground pipe leakage detection, railroad ballast assessment, etc. The focus of this dissertation is to investigate the key techniques to tackle with GPR signal processing from three perspectives: (1) Removing or suppressing the radar clutter signal; (2) Detecting the underground target or the region of interest (RoI) in the GPR image; (3) Imaging the underground target to eliminate or alleviate the feature distortion and reconstructing the shape of the target with good fidelity. In the first part of this dissertation, a low-rank and sparse representation based approach is designed to remove the clutter produced by rough ground surface reflection for impulse radar. In the second part, Hilbert Transform and 2-D Renyi entropy based statistical analysis is explored to improve RoI detection efficiency and to reduce the computational cost for more sophisticated data post-processing. In the third part, a back-projection imaging algorithm is designed for both ground-coupled and air-coupled multistatic GPR configurations. Since the refraction phenomenon at the air-ground interface is considered and the spatial offsets between the transceiver antennas are compensated in this algorithm, the data points collected by receiver antennas in time domain can be accurately mapped back to the spatial domain and the targets can be imaged in the scene space under testing. Experimental results validate that the proposed three-stage cascade signal processing methodologies can improve the performance of GPR system

Modified Low Rank Approximation for Detection of Weak Target by Noise space Exploitation in Through Wall Imaging

Low dielectric materials referred as weak targets are very difficult to detect behind the wall in through wall imaging (TWI) due to strong reflections from wall. TWI Experimental data collected for low dielectric target behind the wall and transceiver on another side of the wall. Recently several researchers are using low-rank approximation (LRA) for reduction of random noise in the various data. Explore the possibilities of using LRA for TWI data for improving the detection of low dielectric material. A novel approach using modification of LRA with exploiting the noise subspace in singular value decomposition (SVD) to detect weak target behind the wall is introduced. LRA consider data has low rank in f-x domain for noisy data, local windows are implemented in LRA approach to satisfy the principle assumptions required by the LRA algorithm itself. Decomposed TWI data in the noise space of the SVD to detect the weak target adaptively. Results for modified LRA for detection of weak target behind the wall are very encouraging over LRA

Coherence-factor-based rough surface clutter suppression for forward-looking GPR imaging

We present an enhanced imaging procedure for suppression of the rough surface clutter arising in forward-looking ground-penetrating radar (FL-GPR) applications. The procedure is based on a matched filtering formulation of microwave tomographic imaging, and employs coherence factor (CF) for clutter suppression. After tomographic reconstruction, the CF is first applied to generate a "coherence map" of the region in front of the FL-GPR system illuminated by the transmitting antennas. A pixel-by-pixel multiplication of the tomographic image with the coherence map is then performed to generate the clutter-suppressed image. The effectiveness of the CF approach is demonstrated both qualitatively and quantitatively using electromagnetic modeled data of metallic and plastic shallow-buried targets

Sparsity-based autoencoders for denoising cluttered radar signatures

Narrowband and broadband indoor radar images significantly deteriorate in the presence of target-dependent and target-independent static and dynamic clutter arising from walls. A stacked and sparse denoising autoencoder (StackedSDAE) is proposed for mitigating the wall clutter in indoor radar images. The algorithm relies on the availability of clean images and the corresponding noisy images during training and requires no additional information regarding the wall characteristics. The algorithm is evaluated on simulated Doppler-time spectrograms and high-range resolution profiles generated for diverse radar frequencies and wall characteristics in around-the-corner radar (ACR) scenarios. Additional experiments are performed on range-enhanced frontal images generated from measurements gathered from a wideband radio frequency imaging sensor. The results from the experiments show that the StackedSDAE successfully reconstructs images that closely resemble those that would be obtained in free space conditions. Furthermore, the incorporation of sparsity and depth in the hidden layer representations within the autoencoder makes the algorithm more robust to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and label mismatch between clean and corrupt data during training than the conventional single-layer DAE. For example, the denoised ACR signatures show a structural similarity above 0.75 to clean free space images at SNR of −10 dB and label mismatch error of 50%

Compressed sensing for enhanced through-the-wall radar imaging

Through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI) is an emerging technology that aims to capture scenes behind walls and other visually opaque materials. The abilities to sense through walls are highly desirable for both military and civil applications, such as search and rescue missions, surveillance, and reconnaissance. TWRI systems, however, face with several challenges including prolonged data acquisition, large objects, strong wall clutter, and shadowing effects, which limit the radar imaging performances and hinder target detection and localization

Research on Target Detection Algorithm of Radar and Visible Image Fusion Based on Wavelet Transform

The target detection rate of unmanned surface vehicle is low because of waves, fog, background clutter and other environmental factors on the interference. Therefore, the paper studies the target detection algorithm of radar and visible image fusion based on wavelet transform. The visible image is preprocessed to ensure the detection effect. The multi-scale fractal model is used to extract the target features, and the difference between the fractal features of the target and the background is used to detect the target. The radar image is denoised by a combination of median filtering and wavelet transform. The processed visible light and radar image are fused with wavelet transform strategy. The coefficients of the low frequency sub-band are processed by the average fusion strategy. The coefficients of the high frequency sub-band are processed using a strategy with a higher absolute value. The standard deviation, the spatial frequency and the contrast resolution of the image fusion result are compared. The simulation results show that the processed image is better than the unprocessed image after the fusion

Radar Imaging in Challenging Scenarios from Smart and Flexible Platforms

undefine

Blind source separation for clutter and noise suppression in ultrasound imaging:review for different applications

Blind source separation (BSS) refers to a number of signal processing techniques that decompose a signal into several 'source' signals. In recent years, BSS is increasingly employed for the suppression of clutter and noise in ultrasonic imaging. In particular, its ability to separate sources based on measures of independence rather than their temporal or spatial frequency content makes BSS a powerful filtering tool for data in which the desired and undesired signals overlap in the spectral domain. The purpose of this work was to review the existing BSS methods and their potential in ultrasound imaging. Furthermore, we tested and compared the effectiveness of these techniques in the field of contrast-ultrasound super-resolution, contrast quantification, and speckle tracking. For all applications, this was done in silico, in vitro, and in vivo. We found that the critical step in BSS filtering is the identification of components containing the desired signal and highlighted the value of a priori domain knowledge to define effective criteria for signal component selection