Significance of GPR polarisation for improving target detection and characterisation

This paper focuses on the application of ground penetrating radar (GPR) technique for civil engineering purposes, addressing the issues related to wave polarisation and antennas geometry. Even if polarisation of GPR signal is often an underestimated feature during data analysis and post processing, detection or avoidance of a specific target can be managed handling its polarimetric response. This opportunity is of high importance in this field of application, where the mixture of target with different polarimetric response is a commonly encountered situation. To provide an insight of this, two multicomponent GPR surveys have been performed: a first survey to show the effect of antenna-target mutual alignment variation and a second experiment in which the benefits of acquiring with different antenna arrangements are clearly evident. Because each antenna arrangement is sensitive towards different features of the received wavefield, this strategy is able to discriminate targets depending on their geometrical shape, thus delivering better detailed image of the acquired area.