GPR signal analysis: can we get deep-penetration and high-resolution simultaneously?

At a given location if both high- and low-frequency GPR data were available, a synthetic GPR image with deep-penetration and high-resolution can be reconstructed by a signal processing procedure known as the extrapolation with deterministic deconvolution (EDD). There are two fundamental assumptions to make EDD work. First, the correlation (a transfer function or filtering function) between the high- and low-frequency data at one location can be deterministically extracted. Second, this transfer function is spatially stationary so that it can be applied to another location. Based on the principle of applying EDD to seismic data, which is for generating the synthetic well logs from surface seismic data, we have extended EDD treatment to GPR data, which is essentially for recovering the high-resolution contents in greater depths. The compensation of the frequency-dependent absorption loss is based on the constant Q model. This paper presents the preliminary test results with numerical synthetic time records. EDD with the synthetic data appears to be promising. More tests need to be done before EDD can be routinely applied to GPR field data. For a successful application of EDD to real world data, a careful pre-processing of the field data is far more critical than the EDD algorithm itself.