Compressive Sensing for No-Contact 3D Ground Penetrating Radar

No-contact Ground Penetrating Radars (GPRs) are popular microwave sensors for investigating soils or masonry/stone walls. In this paper the authors evaluated the compressive sensing (CS) as possible technique for speeding up the acquisition time of this kind of application. In effect the CS approach could reduce the number of acquisition points, and then the measurement time by using only a random pattern of the antennas positions. The authors found that the data reconstruction loses quality even with a reduction of 25 % of the number of acquisitions, but the features of the targets still visible. With a reduction of 50 % the SNR decrease sensibly and most of the targets are not detectable. Such a time reduction results rather marginal in most practical cases.