Polarity Change Extraction of GPR Data for Under-road Cavity Detection: Application on Sudeoksa Testbed Data.

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the most widely used geophysical survey methods to locate cavities under roads due to its speedy exploration and high-resolution imaging. To locate underground cavities using GPR, we need to distinguish between cavity-induced reflections and other reflections, which can be achieved by examining the polarity change in reflections compared to the polarity of the transmitted signal. The polarity change can be measured from the phase shift between the target and first reflections. To estimate the phase shift in reflections, the method of computing the power spectrum difference between the original trace and background signal was proposed, but the method has a limitation for shallow reflectors. As an alternative method to avoid this limitation, we propose using only one component of the power spectrum difference, the cross-correlation between the target reflection and background signal. The cross-correlation has its maximum peak at a time lag between the target and first reflection (from the air-ground interface). Additionally, the phase at that time lag represents a phase shift between the two reflections. We compare our cross-correlation-based method with the conventional method of computing the whole power spectrum difference and investigate the feasibility of our method for distinguishing cavity-induced reflections using a 2D field data set acquired in a testbed in Sudeoksa, Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]