A new method to determine locations of rebars and estimate cover thickness of RC structures using GPR data

A new method mainly focusing on automatically searching the locations of rebars in RC structures by using ground penetrating radar measurement data based on the modified existing hyperbolic signatures model is proposed. A comparison of the proposed method with the conventional method and the existing hyperbolic signatures method shows that the proposed method is significantly more accurate and capable of estimating cover thickness with an average accuracy of 3.12%. The results from the proposed method and the existing hyperbolic signatures method indicates that the assumption of zero radius of the rebar, for the rebar diameter not over 32 mm, does not significantly affect the estimated cover thickness.