DSP implementation of rapid imaging of data obtained from UWB radar for use in a pavement inspection GPR system

In the pavement inspection ground-penetrating radar system, the antenna array is mounted on a vehicle, which moves at a high speed. To image the pavement, the data in the frequency domain need to be processed rapidly on a digital signal processor (DSP). The DSP can be made to operate at a higher speed when the processing is based on a fixed-point data type. In this paper, the responses from far targets are shown to suffer from precision loss when they are processed on a fixed-point data type. A compensation filter to prevent the precision loss is presented. The filter is applied in the frequency domain before the time-domain transformation. The filter is applied to the measured data using ultra-wideband radar and shown to generate clear images of both near and far targets.