Diffraction tomographic imaging algorithm for airborne ground penetrating radar

Airborne ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a promising technology to investigate wide areas or inaccessible regions. The effectiveness of an airborne GPR system not only depends on its hardware design, but also relies on the adopted imaging approaches. Some synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) imaging algorithms have been successfully used to provide well-focused images with accurate target localization. In this paper, with the framework of linear inverse scattering, a diffraction tomography airborne GPR imaging algorithm exploiting the spatial Fourier transform relationship between the object function and the scattered frequency domain field is utilized to reconstruct the localization and dielectric properties of targets. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by the synthetic data generated by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) code.