Photogrammetry for Mapping Underground Utility Lines with Ground Penetrating Radar in Urban Areas

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is an active instrument often used to detect underground utility locations up to a few meters. To perform a three-dimensional reconstruction of position and geometry of the surveyed features, the accuracy of GPR position data has to be in the order of 20-30 cm. This requirement is easily attainable using a GNSS system in open sky conditions, while in urban areas signal leakage is frequent, leading to inadequate position accuracy or even positioning failure. Usually, in those cases, GPS/INS navigation systems are used, but they are quite an expensive solution. To determine the position of the GPR, another strategy could be utilizing a photogrammetric method that uses information extracted from a large scale map, often available for towns. In this paper, the characteristics of this procedure and some possible configurations of cameras are described. Results obtained from preliminary tests are hereby presented and discussed to demonstrate that the proposed methodology could achieve the required precision.