Tomographic microwave imaging for nondestructive evaluation and object recognition of civil structures and materials

Subsurface radar has many applications toward the imaging of civil structures. In this paper we discuss the theories behind pulse-echo impulse radar, and introduce a method for the identification of material type for detected targets. The method performs a singular value decomposition of the wave field at the target to generate a unique signature for each type of material of interest. By creating a database of signatures, unknown object signatures can be compared to the database to identify the best match. Experiments are performed to image different objects imbedded in concrete. The images are displayed and object recognition results presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of pulse-echo impulse radar for NDE applications.