A review of geometric issues in GPR prospecting of cylindrical structures in Cultural Heritage applications

Cultural Heritage diagnostics often involves the application of geophysical methods like ground penetrating radar along non-planar surfaces. Sometimes, as in the investigation of columns with a small radius, the basic assumption underlying the application of conventional processing algorithms (half-space geometry) is strongly violated. Although frequently overlooked, this implies that appropriate algorithms should be developed to take into account the additional data complexity arising from the unusual acquisition setting and exceptional care should be used in interpreting the radargrams. Through numerical and real data examples an in-depth analysis of reflection/diffraction features from buried and above-surface objects is performed in this paper.