Tomographic airborne ground penetrating radar imaging: Achievable spatial resolution and on-field assessment

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) airborne systems are gaining an increasing attention as effective monitoring tools capable of underground investigation of wide areas. With respect to this frame, the paper deals with a reconstruction approach specifically designed to image buried targets from airborne gathered scattered field data. The role of the measurement configuration is investigated in order to address the practical problem of how multi-monostatic and multi-frequency data should be gathered, in terms of synthetic aperture length and frequency range, and how the available data affect the achievable reconstruction capabilities. Such an analysis allows us to evaluate the performance of the reconstruction approach in terms of transversal and depth resolution limits. Finally, an experimental validation of the approach is performed by processing real data.