Enabling High-Resolution Micro-Vibration Detection Using Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Case Study for Pipeline Monitoring

The wellbeing of pipelines is influenced by a range of factors, such as internal and external pressures, as well as deterioration over time due to issues like erosion and corrosion. It is thus essential to establish a reliable monitoring system that can precisely examine pipeline behavior over time in order to prevent potential damages. To this end, pipelines are inspected based on internal and external approaches. Radar, as a non-contact sensing system, can be a suitable choice for external pipeline inspection. Radar is capable of the transmission and receiving of thousands of signals in a second, which reconstructs the displacement signal and is used for a vibration analysis. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging adds cross-range resolution to radar signals. However, a data acquisition rate of longer than several seconds makes it unsuitable for sub-second vibration monitoring. This study aims to address this limitation by presenting a method for high-resolution vibration monitoring using ground-based SAR (GBSAR) signals. To this end, a signal processing method by modifying the radar’s signal model is presented, which allows for estimating scattering targets’ vibration parameters and angle of arrival with high resolution. The proposed method is validated with numerical simulation and a real case study comprising water pipelines. Moreover, various analyses are presented for the in-depth evaluation of the method’s performance in different situations. The results indicate that the proposed method can be effective in detecting pipeline vibration frequencies with micro-scale amplitudes while providing high spatial resolution for generating accurate vibration maps of pipelines. Also, the comparison with the radar observations shows a high degree of agreement between the frequency responses with the maximum error of 0.25 Hz in some rare instances.