Development of High-Speed Ultrawideband Ground-Penetrating Radar for Rebar Detection

This paper describes the development of new air-coupled ultrawideband ground-penetrating radar (GPR) for highway pavement and bridge deck inspections that can achieve high spatial resolution and high inspection performance while operating on vehicles driving at regular highway speeds. Themajor design features include dual-frequency band operation, 8 gigasamples per second high-speed real-time data acquisition, high-speed large volume data transmission and storage, and customized signal-processing algorithms for GPR image enhancement and feature extractions. For design validations, steel reinforcing bar detection experiments in various setups are conducted. The measurement results show good agreement with the subsurface feature configurations. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EM.1943-7889.0000458. © 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Structure reinforcement; Sampling; Imaging techniques; Radar. Author keywords: GPR system; Rebar detection; High-speed real-time sampling; Air coupled; Imaging processing.