Multitarget detection/tracking for monostatic ground penetrating radar: Application to pavement profiling

Monostatic ground penetrating radar (GPR) has proven to be a useful techniq ue in pavement profiling, In road and highway pavements, layer thickness an d permittivity of asphalt and concrete can be estimated by using an inverse scattering approach, Layer-stripping inversion refers to the iterative est imation of layer properties from amplitude and time of delay (TOD) of echoe s after their detection, This method is attractive for realtime implementat ion, in that accuracy is improved by reducing false alarms. To make layer stripping useful, a multitarget detection/tracking (D/T) algo rithm is proposed. It exploits the lateral continuity of echoes arising fro m a multilayered medium, Interface D/T means that both detection and tracki ng are employed simultaneously (not sequentially). For each scan, both dete ction of the target and tracking of the corresponding TOD of the backscatte red echoes are based on the evaluated a posteriori probability density. The TOD is then estimated by using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) or the minim um mean square error (MMSE) criterion. The statistical properties of a scan are related to those of the neighboring ones by assuming, for the interfac e, a first-order Markov model.