The use of a chirp signal is one of the methods to expand the detection range in subsurface radar. However, the presence of time-sidelobes after a conventional pulse-compression makes the detection range degraded because weak signals from underground objects are covered with a large time-sidelobe due to a ground surface reflection. In this paper, we propose a new pulse compression subsurface radar using a short chirp signal in which the echoes from the ground surface and the object are not overlapped. We show that the short chirp signal can improve the detection ability compared with a conventional chirp signal and examine the influence that the decreases of the signal duration and the compression ratio exert on the detection range. By the new pulse compression subsurface radar, the steel pipes buried down to 5 m in depth can be detected.

The application of subsurface radar using electromagnetic waves in the VHF band is wide and includes surveying voids under the ground and archaeological prospecting. To achieve a wider application range, the survey depth must be deeper. In this paper, a method of pulse compression using a chirp signal as one of the methods to fulfill this requirement is described, and its advantages and problems are discussed. First, a delay correlation method is proposed as a processing method of pulse compression. It converts RF band chirp signal directly into a pulse. Moreover, the method improves the S/N ratio by over 40 dB compared with conventional pulse radar. Therefore, it has the same detection ability as conventional pulse radar even though it uses less transmitting power. Next, the influences of RF amplifier saturation and underground propagation characteristics on the chirp signal are discussed; both are shown to have little influence on the detection ability of the method.

This paper discusses the classification of targets buried in the underground by radar polarimetry. The subsurface radar is used for the detection of objects buried beneath the ground surface, such as gas pipes, cables and cavities, or in archeological exploration operation. In addition to target echo, the subsurface radar receives various other echoes, because the underground is inhomogeneous medium. Therefore, the subsurface radar needs to distinguish these echoes. In order to enhance the discrimination capability, we first applied the polarization anisotropy coefficient to distinguish echoes from isotropic targets (plate, sphere) versus anisotropic targets (wire, pipe). It is straightforward to find the man-made target buried in the underground using the polarization anisotropy coefficient. Second, we tried to classify targets using the polarimetric signature approach, in which the characteristic polarization state provides the orientation angle of an anisotropic target. All of these values contribute to the classification of a target. Field experiments using an ultra-wideband (250 MHz to 1 GHz) FM-CW polarimetric radar system were carried out to show the usefulness of radar polarimetry. In this paper, several detection and classification results are demonstrated. It is shown that these techniques improve the detection capability of buried target considerably.

The techniques for imaging optically opaque region using an electromagnetic wave radar are being developed. One important application of these techniques is the detection of buried pipes and cables. The image quality of subsurface radar often becomes low because the electromagnetic waves are affected by the attenuation and inhomogeneity of soil. Hence, a method which improves the quality of the radar images has been required. The migration method is utilized in reflective seismic processing and is derived based on the solution of the wave equation represented in spatial frequency domain. It is classified into the F-K and the phase-shift (P-S) migration method. The former is derived on the assumption that propagation velocity of the wave is uniform in the soil while the latter is assumed that the propagation velocity is varying depending on the depth from the ground surface. The P-S method gives relatively good quality images but it requires very long computation time. In this paper, we propose the block migration method in which the F-K method is applied to the divided image blocks with local propagation velocity. In order to solve a problem concerning the connection between the contiguous blocks we present two approaches which are the processings using the overlapped regions and the Lapped Orthogonal Transform (LOT). Some experimental results point out that the block migration method has a good capability of improving the image quality and the processing time using LOT becomes one tenth in comparison with the P-S method.

A two-dimensional quasi-exact active imaging method for detecting the conducting objects buried in a dielectric half-space is proposed. In this imaging method, an image function which is a projection of buried object to an arbitrary direction, is introduced exactly by taking account of the presence of the planar boundary. The image function is synthesized from the scattering fields which are measured by moving a transmitting antenna (a current source) and a receiving antenna (an observation point) simultaneously along the ground surface. The scattering field is generated by the physical optics current assumed on the surface of buried object. Because the effectiveness of physical optics approximation has been confirmed for this problem, this is a quasi-exact active imaging method. The validity of this imaging method is confirmed by some numerical simulations and an experiment.

This paper proposes that the statistical property of the wave form obtained by a pulse type subsurface radar follows the Weibull probability density distribution. The shape parameter of this distribution is related to the underground condition. By using the shape parameter, we calculated the statistical variance. The ratio of the variance of target area to that of non-target area in invisible medium is evaluated for the effect of the radar signal processing. Over 20dB improvement, for example, can be obtained by means of Log/CFAR processing. It made clear that the cell size of processing should be selected the length corresponding to self-correlation.

The antennas for subsurface radar are usually covered with a conducting cavity to prevent the radiation field from affecting the electromagnetic environment and to protect the received field from external noises. Furthermore, radiowave absorber is attached to the interior wall of the cavity in order to suppress the multiple reflections in the cavity. In this paper, the characteristics of the two-dimensional cavity-backed antenna having the absorber and the over-all properties of this subsurface radar due to buried objects are numerically analyzed by the Finite-Difference Time-Domain method. It is shown that the pulse propagation in the ground is confined to the narrow region due to the cavity. It is also shown that the multiple reflections in the cavity are effectively suppressed by choosing the suitable absorber, and so that the distinctive pulse echo can be obtained.