Content-based image retrieval approaches to interpret ground penetrating radar data

•A new data processing technique for GPR data interpretation is developed to quantify fouling conditions of railroad ballast.•The technique is based on texture retrieval of GPR images.•Discrete wavelet transform is used to extract texture features.•Similarity measurement is performed using different methods.•The accuracy of quantifying ballast fouling level is high.

This paper presents a new data processing algorithm to interpret ground penetrating radar (GPR) data for quantification of railroad ballast fouling conditions. The algorithm is based on the observation that different fouling levels generate different textures in the GPR images. The algorithm was designed following the content-based image retrieval procedure, which includes two steps: feature extraction and similarity measurement. First, texture feature was extracted using discrete wavelet transform. Second, similarity measurement was performed. Laboratory GPR data were used to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm. The accuracy was 93%, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the algorithm.