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Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) airborne systems are gaining an increasing attention as effective monitoring tools capable of underground investigation of wide areas. With respect to this frame, the paper deals with a reconstruction approach specifically designed to image buried targets from airborne gathered scattered field data. The role of the measurement configuration is investigated in order to address the practical problem of how multi-monostatic and multi-frequency data should be gathered, in terms of synthetic aperture length and frequency range, and how the available data affect the achievable reconstruction capabilities. Such an analysis allows us to evaluate the performance of the reconstruction approach in terms of transversal and depth resolution limits. Finally, an experimental validation of the approach is performed by processing real data. © 2014.

The investigation of difficult accessible areas is more and more an important issue for exploration of ore deposits and ground water, glaciology and pipeline mapping. Compared with ground-based GPR measurements, wide areas can be explored faster in a dense grid. In cooperation with the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), a new helicopter GPR based on gated stepped frequency technology was developed. The paper will describe the development of the stepped frequency radar and the application specific antennas. The first application results of this new GPR will be discussed in order to quantify the performance of the new technology.

Airborne ground penetrating radar is a suitable tool to perform cost-effective surveys of the underground of large possibly nonaccessible areas. To tackle the imaging problem underlying this technology, we propose a regularized inverse scattering procedure. The capabilities of the approach to achieve a stable solution and its imaging performance are first assessed against synthetic data. Then, results obtained by processing data collected by means of a gated stepped frequency system mounted on a helicopter are provided as examples of on-field test cases.