A review on ground penetrating radar technology for the detection of buried or trapped victims

The localization of people buried or trapped under snow or debris is an emerging field of application of ground penetrating radar (GPR). In the last years, technological solutions and processing approaches have been developed to improve detection accuracy, speed up localization, and reduce false alarms. As such, GPR can play an active role in cooperative approaches required to tackle such emergencies. In this work, we present and briefly analyze the evolution of research in this field of application of GPR technology. In doing so, we adopt a point of view that takes into account that avalanches and collapsed buildings are two scenarios that call for different GPR approaches, since the former can be tackled through image processing of radar data, while the latter rely on the detection of the Doppler frequency changes induced by physiological movements of survivors, such as breathing.