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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO. 2, MARCH 2012

A Fast Back-Projection Algorithm Based on Cross Correlation for GPR Imaging

Lin Zhou, Chunlin Huang, and Yi Su, Member, IEEE
AbstractIn ground-penetrating radar imaging, the classic back-projection (BP) algorithm has an excellent reputation for imaging in layered mediums with convenience and robustness. However, the classic BP algorithm is time consuming and with a lot of artifacts, which have adverse effects on the following work like detection and recognition. A novel BP algorithm, which is both fast and with good effect of suppressing artifacts, is proposed in this letter. At rst, an approved approximation method is used to calculate the position of refraction point with remarkable speed and satisfactory accuracy. Then, a lookup table is used to reduce the redundancy in classic BP algorithm. In order to achieve effective artifact suppression, a cross-correlation-based method is introduced. Experimental results of eld data present the superiority of the proposed BP algorithm over its classic counterpart both in operation speed and artifact suppression. Index TermsBack projection (BP), cross ground-penetrating radar (GPR), radar imaging. correlation,
Fig. 1. Imaging conguration.

I. I NTRODUCTION ROUND-PENETRATING radar (GPR) imaging has drawn lots of attention both in military and civilian elds for its remarkable capability of nondestructive detection and classication [1], [2]. The back-projection (BP) algorithm [3][5] is one of the most practical imaging methods for its convenience and robustness, particularly when the imaging scene can be modeled as layered mediums. Because the refraction phenomenon is seriously considered, the distortion of the wave path will be accurately compensated in BP algorithm. However, there are two main disadvantages of BP algorithm. The rst one is the high computation burden of the algorithm. In order to calculate the positions of refraction points, a quartic equation should be solved for every subsurface point to be imaged. It takes lots of time to solve the equation and repeat it all over the imaging scene. The second disadvantage is there are too much artifacts with high energy in the imaging result. The existence of artifacts decreases the contrast between objects and nonobjects, which will cause negative effects on the following work. In this letter, we propose a novel BP algorithm which is fast and, at the same time, with artifact suppression effect. An approved approximation method is proposed to calculate the
Manuscript received May 14, 2011; revised June 23, 2011, July 21, 2011, and August 3, 2011; accepted August 13, 2011. Date of publication September 29, 2011; date of current version February 8, 2012. The authors are with the School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China (e-mail: nudtzhoulin@gmail.com; hclg@netease.com; y.su@yeah.net). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LGRS.2011.2165523

intersection of the wave path on the ground surface with high efciency and accuracy. A lookup table is also used to reduce the redundancy in BP algorithm. Finally, we add an additional cross-correlation procedure in the original algorithm to suppress the artifacts. Experimental results validate the rapidity and effectivity of the proposed algorithm. II. C LASSIC BP A LGORITHM The 2-D imaging conguration of the GPR system is shown in Fig. 1. The scene is divided into two regions by z = 0. The upper region is air with permittivity 1 = 0 and permeability 1 = 0 , where 0 and 0 are the corresponding parameters in free space. The lower region is homogeneous earth with permittivity 2 = r 0 and permeability 2 = 0 , where r is the relative permittivity of the soil. In this letter, we do not take into account the fact that the soil may have a nonzero conductivity for the sake of simplicity, so the conductivities in both regions are assumed zero. The GPR works in a monostatic way. The antennas transmit and receive signals in each of the M synthetic aperture positions. The currently concerned antenna position is represented by black triangle with the sequence number k, whose coordinates are (xk , h), while other M 1 antenna positions are represented by gray triangles. For a given point A with coordinates (x0 , z0 ) in the imaging area, the transmitting signal travels from (xk , h) to (x0 , z0 ), with a turning at the inection point (xr , 0), and returns along the same path in reverse direction. The angles of incidence and refraction are denoted by i and t , respectively. According to Snells law, the geometry in Fig. 1 satises sin i = r sin t (1)

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which can be easily turned into the following form: (xr xk )2 z 2 + (x0 xr )2 0 = r . h2 + (xr xk )2 (x0 xr )2 (2)

Then, xr can be solved from (2), which is actually a quartic equation. If xr is known, the round-trip time delay will be A,k =
2 2 h2 + (xr xk )2 2 z0 + (x0 xr )2 + c c/ r

(3)

where c is the velocity of electromagnetic wave in free space. The expression of A,k means the round-trip time delay from the imaging point A to the kth antenna position. For a given point A, the rst step of BP algorithm is to calculate the round-trip time delays from A to each of the M antenna positions {A,1 , A,2 , . . . , A,M }. The response of point A is contained in all the M receiving signals (A-scans), which are denoted as si (t), i = 1, . . . , M . Then, the time delays are used to search out the corresponding response of point A in each of the M A-scans. By this step, an M 1 array for point A is formed: {uA,1 , uA,2 , . . . , uA,M }, where uA,i = si (t)|t=A,i . Then, the value of point A in the nal image can be formulated as
M

Fig. 2. Comparison of the inection points positions calculated by Snells law and approximation methods.

EA =
i=1

uA,i .

(4)

The aforementioned steps will be repeated until all the points in the imaging scene are considered. III. FAST BP A LGORITHM BASED ON C ROSS C ORRELATION In Section II, the classic BP algorithm is reviewed. However, this algorithm is time consuming and with high-level artifacts. We will deal with the two main problems, respectively. A. Acceleration of BP Algorithm In the procedure of BP algorithm, it is necessary to solve (2) for at least M times for just one imaging point. The computational burden will be tremendously large. It can be derived that xr is bounded between x1 and x0 , where x1 is the intersection of x-axis and the line connecting (xk , h) and (x0 , z0 ). Mast and Johansson has proposed a useful method [6] for directly approximating the value as follows: xr x0 + (x1 x0 )/ r . (5) Then, solving for a quartic equation turns to a linear one. The acceleration of calculating xr is obvious. However, this method is not quite accurate when the x offset between the antennas and the imaging point is large. Fig. 2 shows the position of xr calculated by Snells law and Mast and Johanssons method, respectively, when h = 0.2 m, z0 = 0.3 m, r = 6, x0 = 0 m, and the antennas position varies from 0 to 2 m. It can be found that the error of the inection points position calculated by Mast and Johanssons method increases rapidly when the antennas are away from the imaging point. The maximum error

of approximation in Fig. 2 is 0.36 m. To avoid the linear increase of the error by Mast and Johanssons method, an approved approximation method is proposed as follows. As Fig. 2 shows, the curve of the inection points position is nearly at when the antennas position is adequately far. If we make |xk x0 | + in (2), then we get x0 + z0 /r 1, xk > x0 xr ||xk x0 |+ = (6) x0 z0 / r 1, xk < x0 . So, the approved approximation method that we proposed is formulated as x x0 +(x1 0 )/ r , |xk x0 | < (z0 +h) r /(r 1) xr = x0 +z0 / r 1, xk x0 +(z0 +h) r /(r 1) x0 z0 / r 1, xk x0 (z0 +h) r /(r 1). (7) It can be shown in Fig. 2 that the proposed method using (7) has a better performance under the same conditions compared with Mast and Johanssons method. The maximum error of the approximation by the proposed method is only 0.02 m, which is much smaller than 0.36 m caused by Mast and Johanssons method. The corresponding error of time delay decreases from 1.66 to 0.014 ns. For a typical GPR system with a time window of 12 ns and 512 measurement points in an A-scan, 0.014 ns is smaller than sampling interval. So, the proposed method for estimating the position of the inection point is fast, and the error is negligible. There are also a lot of redundant calculations in BP algorithm. If we substitute x0 + and xk + for x0 and xk , respectively, in (2), the new solution of xr will be xr = xr + . That is to say, the relative position of xr to x0 and xk is shift invariant with respect to xk x0 . Take a simple exampletwo imaging points A(xA , z0 ) and B(xA + , z0 ) are with the same coordinates in z-axis, where is the space interval between two synthetic positions. Then, the time delay for point A to the antennas with coordinates (xk , h) is the same with that for point B to the antennas with coordinates (xk + , h).

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Fig. 3. Imaging conguration for a water bottle buried in sand. (a) Geometry of the imaging scene. (b) B-scan prole.

For the feasibility of simplifying the BP algorithm, we assume that the imaging scene can be gridded into (r M ) N points, where r 1 is an integer and N is the number of points in the depth direction. It is reasonable to create an (r M ) N lookup table to record all the possible time delays. In other words, one should only calculate the time delays for (r M ) N times. However, in classic BP algorithm, the process of calculating time delays should be repeated (r M ) N M times in total. In this regard, the computational burden of the proposed algorithm reduces to 1/M of the classic BP algorithm. B. Artifact Suppression The level of the artifacts energy is quite high in the result of classic BP algorithm. In order to suppress the artifacts, Foo and Kashyap [7] and Zetik et al. [8] have utilized a kind of BP algorithm using the information of cross correlation of signals. However, these algorithms need an additional reference signal to correlate with the receiving signals. The reference signal should be acquired far away from the center of antennas, which means that additional hardware resource and signal processing procedure should be added. We propose a novel BP algorithm based on cross correlation to suppress artifacts, which is similar to the confocal microwave imaging method used in medical imaging [9], [10]. The M 1 response array {uA,1 , uA,2 , . . . , uA,M } for a single point A will not be summed directly as (4). Instead, we will rst calculate the cross correlation of these M values to utilize the relativities between the A-scans. Then, a summation is made to get the imaging result of point A as follows:
M 1 M

Fig. 4. Comparison of imaging results for a bottle lled with water. (a) Result of classic BP algorithm. (b) Result of the proposed BP algorithm.

By this additional step, the artifacts will be suppressed effectively, as Section IV shows. Although, for one single imaging point, this operation increases the computational work from M 1 addition to M multiplication and M 1 addition, 2 2 the total consumed time is still much less than that of classic BP algorithm with the methods mentioned previously. IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS The experiments are carried out in a sandbox of 4 m 4 m 1 m (length width height). The sandbox is lled with homogeneous dry sand. The GPR system works in a monostatic way. The antennas of the GPR system are TEM rectangular horns. The transmitting signal is a bipolar pulse with a central frequency of 1 GHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 1.15 GHz. In the rst experiment, a bottle lled with fresh water is buried in sand, as Fig. 3(a) shows. The relative permittivity of the sand is 2.37. The bottle is put along the y-axis. The depth of the center of the bottle is 17 cm, and the diameter of the bottles cross section is 7 cm. The height of antennas is 40 cm. The

EA =
i=1 j=i+1

uA,i uA,j .

(8)

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TABLE I PARAMETERS OF F OUR M INES

Fig. 5. Experimental conguration for four mines. (a) Four mines buried in sand. (b) Projection on the xy plane.

B-scan path is along the x-axis, upon the middle of the bottle. Each scan position is denoted by black dot in Fig. 3(a). The B-scan cross section of the scene is shown in Fig. 3(b). Fig. 4 shows the imaging results of the classic and the proposed BP algorithm, respectively. The true positions of objects are marked with the same white ellipses. It is obvious that Fig. 4(a) has much more artifacts than that in Fig. 4(b). In order to quantitatively describe the effect of artifact suppression, we evaluate the imaging quality by integrated sidelobe ratio (ISLR), which is dened as ISLR = 10 log10 Etotal Emain Emain (9)

where Etotal and Emain are the energies of the whole image and the main lobe of the object. The calculated ISLRs for Fig. 4(a) and (b) are 21.6 and 8.4 dB, respectively; the ISLR decreases by 13.2 dB. It can also be observed that there is a slight improvement of resolution in Fig. 4. The 3-dB width of the objects peak decreases from 39 pixels to 29 pixels in the x-axis and from 10 to 7 in the z-axis. The operation times for the classic BP algorithm and the proposed BP algorithm (in this letter, all the programs are run by Matlab 7.0 on the same hardware) are 54.6 and 7.3 s, respectively, i.e., the speed of the proposed algorithm is much faster than the classic BP algorithm. In the next experiment, four mines are buried in sand, as Fig. 5 shows. The relative permittivity of the sand is 2.15. The height of the antennas is 38.6 cm. The B-scan path is mainly along the x-axis, through the center of the mine region. Each scan position is denoted by black dot in Fig. 5(a) and (b). The projection of the scene to the xy plane is shown in Fig. 5(b). The detailed parameters of these four cylindric mines are listed in Table I.

Fig. 6. Comparison of imaging results for four mines. (a) Result of the classic BP algorithm. (b) Result of the proposed BP algorithm.

The imaging results of the classic and the proposed BP algorithm are shown in Fig. 6. The true positions of objects are marked with white rectangles or ellipses according to their proles on the xy plane. It is inappropriate to evaluate the imaging performance of multiple objects by ISLR; however, the superiority in artifact suppression and resolution of the proposed BP algorithm over the classic one is conspicuous. The operation time for the classic BP algorithm is 181.5 s, but the proposed BP algorithm only takes 26.1 s.

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V. C ONCLUSION The proposed BP algorithm has dramatically suppressed the artifacts in the imaging result of the classic BP algorithm by using the cross-correlation information of the receiving data. Moreover, with the approved approximation method for calculating the position of inection point and the using of lookup table, the computational speed of the proposed BP algorithm is much faster than that of the classic BP algorithm. The application of the proposed algorithm is practically valuable in the imaging of underground objects with fast speed and high quality. However, the success of both classic and proposed BP algorithms relies on a known wave velocity in the medium, i.e., the permittivity of the medium is known. The following work will focus on the circumstances without prior knowledge of the medium being imaged. R EFERENCES
[1] S. Yi, H. Chunlin, and L. Wentai, Theory and Applications of Ground Penetrating Radar. Beijing, China: Sci. Press, 2006, ch. 4. [2] M. Grasmueck, R. Weger, and H. Horstmeyer, Full-resolution 3D GPR imaging for geoscience and archeology, in Proc. IEEE 10th Int. Conf. Ground Penetrating Radar, 2004, vol. 1/2, pp. 329332.

[3] J. I. Halman, K. A. Shubert, and G. T. Ruck, SAR processing of ground-penetrating radar data for buried UXO detection: Results from a surface-based system, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 46, no. 7, pp. 10231027, Jul. 1998. [4] L. Carin, N. Geng, M. McClure, J. Sichina, and L. Nguyen, Ultra-wideband synthetic-aperture radar for mine-eld detection, IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 1833, Feb. 1999. [5] C. Lei and S. Ouyang, A time-domain beamformer for UWB throughwall imaging, in Proc. IEEE Region 10 Conf., 2007, pp. 14. [6] J. E. Mast and E. M. Johansson, Three-dimensional ground penetrating radar imaging using synthetic aperture time-domain focusing, in Proc. SPIEAdvanced Microwave and Millimeter Wave Detectors, 1994, vol. 2275, pp. 205214. [7] S. Foo and S. Kashyap, Cross-correlated back projection for UWB radar imaging, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., 2004, vol. 2, pp. 12751278. [8] R. Zetik, J. Sachs, and R. Thoma, Modied cross-correlation back projection for UWB imaging: Numerical examples, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Ultra-Wideband, 2005, pp. 650654. [9] E. C. Fear, X. Li, S. C. Hagness, and M. A. Stuchly, Confocal microwave imaging for breast cancer detection: Localization of tumors in three dimensions, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 812822, Aug. 2002. [10] H. B. Lim, N. T. T. Nhung, E. P. Li, and N. D. Thang, Confocal microwave imaging for breast cancer detection: Delay-multiply-and-sum image reconstruction algorithm, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 16971704, Jun. 2008.