We consider migration based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of surfaced or shallowly buried objects using both down-looking and forward-looking ground penetrating radar (GPR). The well-known migration approaches devised to image the interior of the earth are based on wave equations and have been widely and successfully used in seismic signal processing for oil exploration for decades. They have exhibited great potentials and convenience to image the underground objects buried in complicated propagation medium. Compared to the ray-tracing based SAR imaging methods, the migration based SAR imaging approaches are more suited for the imaging of the underground objects due to their simple and direct treatment of the oblique incidence at the air-ground interface and the propagation velocity variation in the soil. In this paper, we apply the phase-shift migration approach to both the constant-offset and the common-shot experimental data collected by the PSI (Planning Systems Inc.) GPR systems. We will address the spatial aliasing problems related to the application of migration to the GPR data and the spatial zero-padding approach to circumvent the problem successfully.

Date Published: 12 September 2003
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 5095, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery X, (12 September 2003);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5095:
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery X
Edmund G. Zelnio; Frederick D. Garber, Editor(s)