The detection of buried pipes from time-of-flight radar data

Ultrawideband radar is commonly used in the frequency range of 50–500 MHz to detect buried pipes at a depth of about 1–2 m depending on the soil characteristics. The typical feature used to locate the pipes is the hyperbolic pattern of the time of flight generated by a linear scan of the antenna above the surface. When the pipes are close together, the hyperbolas overlap, and a straightforward least squares fit is not possible. The Hough transform provides one possible solution. This paper extends the Hough transform by introducing a weighting factor depending on the differentials of the unknown parameters with respect to the experimental errors, namely, the probe position error and the time-of-flight error. This enables optimally placed sets of data pairs to be given greater weight than “ill-conditioned” sets, as for example when all data pairs lie near one end of the arc. The result is a decrease in the background amplitude with respect to the maximum of the peaks in the Hough accumulator space. It is shown that this improvement persists even when many arcs are present. A mathematical analysis with analytical results is given for the case of four unknowns: pipe radius R, pipe center position (Y , Z), and soil propagation velocity V . The results are presented through simulations introducing controlled uncertainties in the probe position, the time of flight, and its bin size. The simulations demonstrate the correlations that occur between the radius, depth, and velocity for given experimental uncertainties.