Compressive Sensing for GPR Imaging

The theory of compressive sensing (CS) enables the reconstruction of sparse signals from a small set of non-adaptive linear measurements by solving a convex lscr₁ minimization problem. This paper presents a novel data acquisition and imaging algorithm for ground penetrating radars (GPR) based on CS by exploiting sparseness in the target space, i.e., a small number of point-like targets. Instead of measuring conventional radar returns and sampling at the Nyquist rate, linear projections of the returned signal with random vectors are taken as measurements. Using simulated and experimental GPR data, it is shown that sparser and sharper target space images can be obtained compared to standard backprojection methods using only a small number of CS measurements. Furthermore, the target region can even be sampled at random aperture points.