Emphasis of GPR signals reflected from buried pipes using statistical clustering techniques

When digging paved ground, it is necessary to check in advance the location of buried pipes without damaging them. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which can be used for imaging without destroying underground structures, has been commonly used. However it becomes a burden for the user of GPR to visually check the location of the buried pipes from the signal received from a GPR. We have already proposed a wavelet-based method to solve this problem. We introduced a "clustering technique" for emphasizing reflected waves from pipes. Since it is based on a statistical procedure, we have the problem of showing different results for each trial. In this paper, we propose a new method for reducing the dispersion of clustering results by implementing the original method several times. This method is not for detecting the location of buried pipes, but it aims at an improvement of the precision in comparison to the original method.