Utility detection and positioning on the urban site Sense-City using Ground-Penetrating Radar systems

•Definition of a test site with buried canonical objects for utility detection.•Definition of measurement conditions: time range, step distance, frequency.•Physical phenomena induced by dielectric and conductive utilities buried in trenches.•Detection capability of different GPR systems in the time and frequency domains.•Polarization diversity on the detection and identification of buried objects.

This paper presents the design of a novel Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) test site that has been integrated into the mini-city demonstrator Sense-City located at University Paris-Est (France). This test site provides several sources of measurement interest expressed by the presence of a multilayered soil with significant dielectric contrasts, and various dielectric pipes and blades buried at various depths in trenches filled with a backfill soil different from the natural soil. This paper presents experimental Bscans associated with the pipe zone acquired by three different GPR systems at frequencies ranging from 300 MHz to 1.5 GHz. The interpretation and comparison of the raw Bscans have allowed to characterize the dielectric properties of the soil layers, and to detect the hyperbola signatures of the buried pipes. The results of this study will help to guide future developments on polarization, operating frequency and signal processing to extract parameters (orientation, dielectric characteristics, position and size) associated with pipes.