Compressive sensing of underground structures using GPR

Feature detection in sensing problems usually involves two processing stages. First, the raw data collected by a sensor, such as a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), is inverted to form an image of the subsurface area. Second, the image is searched for features like lines using an algorithm such as the Hough Transform (HT), which converts the problem of finding spatially spread patterns in the image space to detecting sparse peaks in the HT parameter space. This paper exploits the sparsity of features to combine the two stages into one direct processing step using Compressive Sensing (CS). The CS framework finds the HT parameters directly from the raw sensor measurements without having to construct an image of the sensed media. In addition to skipping the image formation step, CS processing can be done with a minimal number of raw sensor measurements, which decreases the data acquisition cost. The utility of this CS-based method is demonstrated for finding buried linear structures in both simulated and experimental GPR data.