ABSTRACT
High-frequency air-coupled Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems are used in road engineering for achieving high-resolution and fast imaging of the shallow layers of pavements. Regulatory policies on the permitted radiated power enacted by some international agencies for information and communication technologies, such as, the Federal Communications Commission operating in the United States, have led manufacturers to market low-powered GPR systems to comply with the standards.
The signal collected by these systems is more unstable than ordinary-powered GPRs, with the interpretation of the raw data being misleading or, mostly, totally subjective or even impossible. Thereby, the use of relevant signal processing techniques combined purposely within procedural schemes may help to reach reliability and effectiveness levels close to those granted by standard systems. In this study, a postprocessing scheme aimed at maximising the correlation between signals collected by low-powered and standard 2 GHz antenna systems in railway and road surveys is presented.
