Data analysis technique to leverage ground penetrating radar ballast inspection performance

Fouled ballast is a typical problem faced by many freight and passenger rail agencies. Due to the underground nature of this problem, we have developed a high-speed air coupled ultra wideband (UWB) ground penetrating radar (GPR) that is applicable for ballast inspection. Implemented with the GPR hardware, new GPR signal processing algorithms including Bicubic interpolation, gain compensation, and reflection signal envelope extraction in conjunction with background removal are developed to remove noise and interference while preserve and enhance the subsurface features under inspection. The entire system is tested extensively on a customer-built structure emulating a segment of railroad track. The results show that the system can effectively detect subsurface objects and characterize ballast fouling conditions.