GPR Imaging Relying on Frequency-Diverse Compressive Antennas

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems have demonstrated their ability to successfully detect both metallic and non-metallic targets, making them very attractive for multiple applications. In addition, the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques enables GPR systems to retrieve high-resolution images of buried targets, facilitating not only their detection but also their identification. However, the dense sampling required by GPR-SAR systems to fulfill the Nyquist criterion limits their survey speed or results in high-complexity hardware if large arrays of transmitters and receivers are considered. Compu-tational imaging (CI) has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome some of the drawbacks of SAR-based systems. CI enables a significantly faster survey speed relying on compressive antennas capable of compressing the scene information into a single channel (or a reduced number of them). This contribution proposes, for the first time, the idea of resorting to CI for GPR, and presents a frequency-diverse compressive antenna specifically tailored for GPR applications working at S- and C-bands. In addition, the feasibility of imaging buried targets from a single acquisition is successfully demonstrated.