GPR Prospecting Through an Inverse-Scattering Frequency-Hopping Multifocusing Approach

An innovative information-acquisition approach to 2-D ground-penetrating radar (GPR) prospecting is presented. A microwave inverse-scattering nested scheme combining a frequency hopping (FH) procedure and a multifocusing (MF) technique is proposed. On the one hand, the FH scheme effectively handles multifrequency GPR data, whereas on the other hand, MF techniques have been proven to be effective tools in reducing the occurrence of multilocal minima affecting GPR investigations. This allows the use of a local search technique based on the conjugate gradient method to iteratively solve the inverse problem at hand. Selected results are reported and analyzed to give some insights to the interested readers on the advantages and limitations of such an approach when handling synthetically generated and experimental GPR data.