A synthetic aperture radar‐based focusing algorithm for B‐scan ground penetrating radar imagery

In the classical B‐Scan ground penetrating radar (GPR) imagery, unprocessed image domain data exhibit undesired hyperbolic effects and therefore have low resolution features. To solve this problem, various focusing or migration techniques have been developed and applied to focus the scattered energy at their true spatial locations in the object space. In this article, we present a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based focusing algorithm to obtain well‐localized two‐dimensional B‐scan GPR images of various buried objects. The concept and the formulation of our frequency domain based imaging algorithm are presented. The performance of the algorithm is tested with both the simulated and measurement data. The simulation data are generated by a physical optics shooting and bouncing ray (PO‐SBR) technique code; whereas the C‐band measured data are collected via an experimental set‐up for different ground environments. Almost perfect focusing performance is achieved for the simulated GPR images. Similarly, well‐focused GPR images with high lateral resolutions are also obtained for the measurement data from metallic and non‐metallic buried objects.