IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2006 3541

A Microwave Tomography Approach for a

Differential Configuration in GPR Prospecting
Raffaele Persico and Francesco Soldovieri

Abstract—The capabilities of a microwave inverse scattering al- is known from the lot of papers published within the frame-
gorithm for ground penetrating radar (GPR) data processing are work of the diffraction tomography (DT). For example, in [8]
analyzed. The algorithm is based on the Born approximation (BA) a multibistatic configuration on a lossy half space has been con-
and exploits a differential measurement configuration. This con-
sidered, in [13] a multistatic (single view and multiview) con-
figuration exploits measurements achieved as the difference of the
electrical fields gathered in two symmetrical positions with respect figuration on a half space has been dealt with, in [14] a mul-
to the source. We will discuss how this choice allows to mitigate tistatic (multiview) configuration in free space has been coped
some bad effects of uncertainties on the knowledge of the back- with, in [15] a bistatic configuration in free space (with the pos-
ground scenario but, on the other hand, affects in a negative way sibility to rotate both the object under test and the position of the
the properties of the relevant scattering operator. receiving antenna) has been examined, in [16] and [17] multi-
Index Terms—Born approximation, differential configuration, static multiview configurations in inhomogeoneous media have
inverse scattering, microwave tomography. been considered. Finally (but of course the list could be much
longer), in [6] an explicit comparison among the capabilities of
three different measurement configurations (multiwiew/multi-
I. INTRODUCTION static, single view/multistatic and multibistatic) has been per-
formed in a two dimensional half space geometry by exploiting
F OR a number of applications, inverse scattering algorithms
[1] can be applied to ground penetrating radar (GPR) [2],
[3] data, gathered either in time or in frequency domain. Gener-
suitable spectral algebraic relationship between the data and the
object function to be retrieved.
With regard to the dielectric profiles retrievable in the frame-
ally, a GPR prospecting involves a large investigation domain,
work of a differential configuration, here we propose an anal-
and this makes appealing fast and efficient inversion algorithms.
ysis that follows the same guidelines of [5]–[9]. In particular,
In particular, in this paper, we make use of the Born approxima-
it will shown that a differential configuration allows to achieve
tion (BA) [4]–[9], that often allows to obtain an acceptable lo-
an amount of independent data smaller compared to that avail-
calization and sizing of the buried objects even in cases beyond
able within a more classical multibistatic configuration. This en-
the range of validity of the Born model itself. This is related to
tails a “reduction” of the functional space where the unknown
the fact that an inversion model based on BA qualitatively tends
contrast function can be looked for. Also, we will show that
to “preserve” the support of the unknown function, as it has been
the class of retrievable objects has a meaningful dependence
noted in 9 and 10. To this pros, let us also note that examples of
on the offset between the antennas, whereas this dependence
strong scattering objects retrieved thanks to a BA-based inver-
is somehow weaker in the case of a multibistatic configuration
sion model have been proposed several times [6], [8].
[6]. Therefore, the convenience to choose a differential configu-
In this paper we propose a linear inverse scattering BA-based
ration should be evaluated also by exploiting the a-priori infor-
algorithm able to deal with the differential measurement tech-
mation (if any) about the geometrical features of the targets.
nique in frequency domain, where the datum is made up of the
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the formula-
difference between the total field data collected at two symmet-
tion of the problem under BA is given for both multibistatic and
rical points with respect to the source. To our knowledge, a dif-
differential configurations. In Section III the question of the ex-
ferential configuration has been first introduced and analyzed
traction of the scattered field from the total field is investigated.
in [11], [12] where the authors discussed (in time domain) the
The reconstruction capabilities of a BA based inversion model
role of the distance between the antennas in dependence on the
in the case of a multibistatic and a differential configurations
background scenario and on the targets.
are theoretically compared in Section IV by means of DT spec-
As it will be shown, a differential configuration can coun-
tral relationships. Section V is devoted to confirm the theoret-
teract some negative effects of slow spatial variation of the back-
ical expectations of Section IV in realistic conditions thanks to
ground scenario, that arise uncertainty on the incident field.
a singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis of the scattering
However, in general, the measurement configuration has a
operator. In Section VI numerical examples are presented. Con-
meaningful effect on the class of retrievable profiles too, as it
clusions follow.

Manuscript received September 12, 2005; revised April 18, 2006.

The authors are with the Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico
dell’Ambiente Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IREA-CNR), I-80124
II. FORMULATION OF THE INVERSE SCATTERING PROBLEM
Napoli, Italy (e-mail: persico.r@irea.cnr.it).
Color versions of Figs. 3–9 are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Fig. 1 depicts the geometry of the problem. The background
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2006.882161 scenario is made up of two homogeneous half spaces. The upper
0018-926X/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
3542
Fig. 1. Geometry of the problem.
Fig. 2. Pictorial of multibistatic (2A) and differential (2B) configurations.
region is made up of vacuum. The lower region shows a rela-
tive dielectric permittivity , possibly complex to account for
losses. The problem at hand concerns the determination of the
(possibly complex) dielectric profile in the probing rect-
angular domain D, embedded in the lower region. The source of
the incident field is a filamentary electric current . Source and
observation are at the interface within an observation
domain . With regard to the position of the ob-
servation points, two possibilities will be considered and com-
pared. The first one is the multibistatic (or common offset) con-
figuration, customarily exploited in GPR prospecting [3], where
source and observation points are linked to each other by means
of a fixed offset [see Fig. 2(a)]. The second configuration is de-
picted in Fig. 2(b), and we will name it “a differential configura-
tion.” In this configuration, for each source point, two opposite
(symmetrical) observation points are considered, and the datum
is made up by the difference between the two signals. With re-
gard to both the considered configurations, the data will be mul-
tifrequency in a fixed frequency range . Time
dependence is assumed.
Under the linear model provided by BA [4]–[9], the scattered
field within a multibistatic configuration is given by [6]:
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006
where is the offset between the source and observation points,
is the source point and, of course, is the observation
point. Moreover.
(2)
is the contrast function, i.e., the relative difference between the
unknown dielectric profile and the background permittivity,
is the wavenumber in the soil. is the
incident (or unperturbed) field, i.e., the electric field in absence
of any buried scattering object. The expressions of the Green’s
function and of the incident field are given in Appendix A.
For the differential configuration, under BA the datum of the
problem is achieved as
(3)
The inverse scattering problem consists in retrieving the con-
trast function from the inversion of the integral relationship (1)
in the case of a multibistatic configuration, whereas it consists in
reconstructing the contrast function from the inversion of the in-
tegral relationship (3) in the case of a differential configuration.
III. THE PROBLEM OF THE DATA
In electromagnetic inverse scattering the datum is the field
scattered from an unknown permittivity profile illuminated by
a known source. However, the receivers gather a signal related
to the total field present in the observation point. Therefore,
the problem of extracting the scattered field from the total field
data arises. This is a problem particularly serious in GPR ap-
plications, because the unavoidable uncertainties on the back-
ground scenario can make unreliable the subtraction of a numer-
ically calculated incident field from the measured total field. An-
other idea to achieve the scattered field data could be to subtract
from the gathered data some other data measured elsewhere, and
specifically in an area where it is a-priori known that no object
is buried. However, apart from the difficulty to know a-priori
where an “empty” subsoil zone is, in many realistic cases the
background scenario shows “slowly variable” (with respect to
the wavelength) spatial characteristics, and therefore the inci-
dent field in the current observation point is different from the
incident field measured elsewhere. Incidentally, there is no the-
oretical error with assuming a “mathematical” background that
does not vary with the observation point, but this amounts to in-
clude the inhomogeneity of the “physical” background scenario
in the contrast function to be retrieved, which can cause severe
problems, as described, e.g., in [18]. The conclusion is that only
(1) in very favorable cases the scattered field can be retrieved by
PERSICO AND SOLDOVIERI: A MICROWAVE TOMOGRAPHY APPROACH
subtracting a numerically calculated, or off-line measured, inci-
dent field from the available total field data. In GPR prospecting,
a common technique to extract the scattered field from the total
field is that performed by gating the first part of the received
signal [19] in time domain.
However, this operation does not lead to a “perfect cancel-
lation” of the incident field from the data, and in particular it
entails that the shallower layers of the soil cannot be reliably
reconstructed. In particular, one substantially renounces to re-
trieve objects within a depth of the order of [3]
(4)
where is the propagation velocity of the light in free space
and is the frequency band of the signal. This occurs because
represents the spatial “extent” of the probing pulses.
In frequency domain, to the best of our knowledge, there is
still no popular technique for the extraction of the scattered field.
Therefore, if one has at disposal data in frequency domain, at the
moment the only available choice seems a gating in time domain
after Fourier back-transforming the data. In this paper, we pro-
pose an alternative possibility that does not require any trans-
formation in time domain and, therefore, is not affected by the
assumptions and/or approximations involved in this procedure.
With reference to Fig. 2(b), the idea consists in assuming as data
not any longer the scattered field, but rather the difference be-
tween the field values in two symmetric points with respect to
the source. In particular, the whole system is symmetric with
respect to the source point, so that transmitting antenna sub-
stantially radiates the same field toward the left-handed and the
right-handed directions. Then two identical receiving antennas
gather the signal at the opposite offsets and with respect
to the source point. Finally, after propagating along two iden-
tical paths, the two signals are subtracted. If no buried object
is present, clearly the differential signal is equal to zero. This
means that, on condition that at most slow variations of the back-
ground scenario are present, a differential configuration enables
us to get rid of the incident field directly from data in frequency
domain, providing a signal only related to the scattered field. In
formulas (with an obvious meaning of the symbols) we have
(5)
because . Let us note that the validity of (5) is in-
dependent from the extent of the frequency band of the incident
signal. We find also interesting to stress the fact that, in the case
of a prospecting on a masonry or more in general on an inhomo-
geneous layered medium, a “simple” gating in time domain is
affected by the problem of the multiple “answers” associated to
the several interfaces between the layers. This makes the inci-
dent field not associated to a single reflection as in the case of a
half space. As a consequence, in these cases time domain gating
might erase the incident field unsatisfactorily, whereas the dif-
ferential procedure of (5) still provides a rigorous cancellation.
3543
IV. PROPERTIES OF THE INVOLVED OPERATOR:
DIFFRACTION TOMOGRAPHY
In this section we analyze some relevant properties of the
two linear integral relationships (1) and (3), that correspond to
the multibistatic and differential configurations, respectively. In
particular, we will focus on the differences between the class of
retrievable profiles in the two cases, by means of DT based con-
siderations. This analysis requires the simplifying hypotheses
that the soil is lossless and that the buried objects are deep
enough. The theoretical expectations “gained” in this analysis
will be then confirmed in the next section by means of a numer-
ical SVD based analysis performed in the more realistic situa-
tion of lossy soil.
At the moment, let us consider a multibistatic configuration,
and let we substitute in (1) the expressions of the Green’s func-
tion and of the incident field as given in Appendix A. After a
number of passages (reported in [6]), BA leads to a spectral al-
gebraic relationship between the contrast and the scattered field.
This relationship is given by
(6)
where
(7)
being the imaginary part of the roots not positive. Moreover
(8)
and are the wavenumbers in the upper and
lower half space, respectively. In (6)–(8), is the conjugate vari-
able of the source position , and are the conjugate vari-
ables of the horizontal abscissa and of the depth respectively,
and the hats in (6) stand for Fourier
transform.
In particular this requires that is real, and in its turn this
limits the retrievable part of the spectrum of the contrast to a
spectral region of finite extent. The retrievable spectral area is
described in detail in [6] for an infinite observation domain,
whereas in [5], [7] and [20] the effects of the truncation of the
observation domain have been accounted for. Therefore, here
we just depict quantitatively this spectral area in Fig. 3. In par-
ticular, Fig. 3 refers to a case with an observation line two
meters long and a band of frequencies ranging from 200 up to
600 MHz. The investigation domain D extends from the depth
of 0.1 m up to the depth of 1.8 m of depth and the soil exhibits
a relative permittivity equal to 9.
From Fig. 3, it can be understood that the class of retrievable
profiles within a multibistatic configuration is expected to un-
dergo a low-pass filtering with regard to the horizontal spatial
variations and a band-pass filtering with regard to the vertical
spatial variations.
3544
Fig. 3. Diffraction tomography retrievable spectral area in the case of the multi-
bistatic configuration.
From a practical point of view, this means that the reconstruc-
tion of a buried homogeneous object “follows” its horizontal
variation, whereas it is expected to reproduce the steeper dis-
continuities represented by the upper and lower bounds of the
object along the depth [5]–[8], [16]–[18].
This premix is important in order to give an insight about what
is expected when adopting a differential configuration. Specif-
ically, also in the case of a differential configuration the rea-
soning starts from (6). In particular, let us note that in (6) the
offset appears only in the phase factor . There-
fore, in the case of a differential configuration the spectral rela-
tionship (6) evolves straightforwardly in
Equation (9) means that, unlike the multibistatic configuration
(where the offset influences the retrievable spectral frequency
set only by means of a relatively unimportant phase factor),
in the framework of a differential configuration the offset
“weights” the spatial frequencies of the retrievable spectral
area, and therefore it is expected to have a stronger effect on
the achievable reconstruction.
In general, the retrievable spectral area is decreased because
some spatial frequencies are penalized in correspondences of
the lower values of the weighting function . This
make us expect a decrease in the dimension of the class of
retrievable objects. In particular, the factor
[see (8)] affects the central part (about the
axis) of the spectral set of Fig. 3. This means that, unlike the
multibistatic case, within a differential configuration we expect
that the reconstruction tends to become band-pass (or possibly
multiband) along the horizontal direction too. In particular, the
value of the offset is expected to have a strong influence on
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006
the class of retrievable profiles, because drives the choice of
the spatial frequencies (further than the spectral axis ) that
will be most “penalized.”
From a practical point of view, this means that a proper choice
of should be somewhat related to a-priori information (if any)
about the horizontal size of the objects looked for. For example,
let us suppose an object whose horizontal extent is with
. In this case, when moving the differential measure-
ment set-up on the object [see Fig. 2(b)], after the left-hand edge
of the object there is a long path where the retrieved differen-
tial signal is very low, and this occurs up to the right-hand edge
of the object. The reconstruction, in this case, will be consti-
tuted by two separate “two-peaks” at the same depth. From a
more mathematical point of view, we can note that a horizontally
long object is expected to have a spectrum particularly concen-
trated about the low horizontal spatial frequencies (in particular
about spatial frequencies lower than ). How-
ever, the more is little the more penalizes the
spectrum of the contrast about low values of (and specifically
values up to the order of ).
A further insight about the features of the retrievable objects
along the horizontal direction can be achieved by introducing
some simplifications in (9). In particular, let us now neglect
the variability of and let us reduce (9) to a one dimen-
sional case by eliminating the variability of the contrast along
the depth. Under these assumptions, (9) reduces to
(10)
Moreover, in order to account for the finiteness of the avail-
able spatial frequency band (related in particular to the trunca-
tion of the observation domain [20]), we suppose that (10) is
assessed only throughout a limited interval of horizontal spa-
tial frequency . At this point, let us consider again
the large object, characterized by an actual contrast
, being . As prompted, the differential
signal is meaningful only in the neighbors of the two bound
(9) points and . Due to this fact, and since
the current calculations are merely qualitative, at this point we
assimilate the signal gathered in this situation with the signal
gathered in correspondence of a couple of Dirac’s functions
.
After this further passage we are able to retrieve the solution
of the inverse problem in closed form
(11)
PERSICO AND SOLDOVIERI: A MICROWAVE TOMOGRAPHY APPROACH 3545

Fig. 4. Differential one dimensional qualitative reconstruction of a large object.

A graph of is given in Fig. 4, with

m, and m. From Fig. 4 we can observe that the Fig. 5. Behavior of the singular values for the four considered configurations.
Solid line:M1 ; dashed line: M1 ; dashed-dotted line D1 ; dotted line
location of the bounds of the objects correspond to null points D1 .
in the reconstructed image , whereas the maxima of the
two sincs are shifted of with respect to the bounds of
the object. The extent of the object is important with regard to
this point, because only if the object is quite larger than the
“tails” of the functions centered about each edge are neg-
ligible about the other edge. This reasoning also depends on the
available band, i.e., on the value of (which drives the width
of the lobes of the sincs). However, an increasing of the band
makes narrower the sincs but does not shift the position of their
maxima.

V. PROPERTIES OF THE INVOLVED OPERATOR:

SVD BASED ANALYSIS
In this section, we confirm the theoretical expectations of the
previous section by means of a numerical SVD of the involved
operators (1) and (3). In particular, we focus on a multifrequency
case wherein the frequency band 200–600 MHz is ranged with a
Fig. 6. Spectral contents for the four considered configurations M1 M1
; ;
step of 25 MHz. In the following examples the investigation do- D1 D1 .
;
main is a rectangle of 1.6 m 1.7 m, starting from the depth of
0.1 m. The relative permittivity of the soil is 9 and its electrical
conductivity is 0.01 S/m. The observation domain is 2 m long cases and , coherently with the fact that the differen-
(at quote 1 cm), and the measurement set-up is moved along it tial configuration entails a reduction of the achievable amount
with a spatial step of 0.05 m. These parameters are the same that of independent data.
underlie the spectral area of Fig. 3 but for the addition of losses In Fig. 6 the spectral content of the main singular functions is
in the soil. shown in all the four cases. The spectral content [5]–[7], [20] is
In order to perform the numerical SVD, the integral relation- the sum of the moduli of the Fourier Transforms of the singular
ships (1) and (3) have been discretized via a method of moments functions related to the singular values above a fixed threshold.
(MoM) by exploiting a functional basis made of 31 Fourier har- In formulas, the spectral content sp is expressed by
monics along the horizontal direction and 31 rectangular steps
along the depth, and point matching has been exploited. With
regard to the offset between source and observation points, two (12)
cases have been considered, one with m and
another with . With the given parameters, both
the multibistatic and the differential configurations have been where
taken into consideration. At last, therefore, we have four cases.
For simplicity of notation, we will label them as (multi- (13)
bistatic with offset ), (differential with offset )
and D . In Fig. 5 we show the behavior of the singular values
in the four cases. As it can be seen, the singular values curves and is the th singular function in the space of the unknowns
in the cases and are higher than the curves in the (again, the hats stands for Fourier transform). Here, N is chosen
3546 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006

as the number of singular values greater than dB with re-

spect to the maximum singular value (which means that here sp
is related to the reconstruction capabilities of a regularized in-
version with truncation of the singular values at dB). From
Fig. 5, we clearly see that the spectral contents in the cases
and are very similar to each other and appear quite “com-
pact,” whereas vertical null stripes appear in both the cases
and . In particular, in the case shows a unique ver-
tical null stripe, because actually has been calculated such
as the period of the function is approximately
equal to the “horizontal” extent of the spectral area of Fig. 3. In-
stead, the spectral content in the case shows narrower and
(twice) nearer vertical null stripes, coherently with the fact that
.

VI. NUMERICAL EXAMPLES

In this section we present numerical results to backup the con-
siderations of the previous sections. The reconstructions are ob-
tained from a truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD)
of the linear scattering operators with a regularization threshold
at dB [21]. The numerical SVD is constructed by means of
MoM and point matching, as described in Section V.
The first example puts into evidence the advantages offered
by a differential configuration with regard to counteracting the
effects of inaccuracy in the knowledge of the background sce-
nario. The target is a square object sized 0.3 0.3 m and cen-
tered in an investigation domain D sized 2 2 m . The investi-
gation domain starts from the depth of 25 cm. The data have
been computed according to the exact model of the electro-
magnetic scattering (as reported in [22]) along an observation
domain at the interface, 2.16 meters long. The spatial step
is 4 cm, the offset between the antennas is 8 cm (meant as
and cm for the differential configuration). In order to sim-
ulate the data, the forward scattering problem has been solved
by means of an iterative code based on conjugate gradient and
made efficient by an extensive use of FFT algorithms. This is
possible due to the convolution structure of the Green’s func-
tion [23]. The frequency band is 200–600 MHz and the fre-
quency step is 25 MHz. The relative permittivity of the
soil has a real part equal to 9 and an imaginary part given by
, where is the current frequency, is
the dielectric permittivity of the free space and is an electrical
conductivity of 0.02 S/m. The square object shows a relative
permittivity , where
. ular if we do not have at disposal an accurate knowledge of
In particular, we have made use of a model with the correct
permittivity of the soil and a second model with a per-
mittivity of the soil . This second model corresponds
to an error in the knowledge of the dielectric characteristic of
the host medium. In addition, in both cases we suppose not to
have a reliable measure of the entity of the losses, and so we
make use of lossless models with . With regard to the
multibistatic configuration, in the cases with a wrong estimation
of the soil permittivity, the scattered field in frequency domain
is calculated by subtracting the erroneously estimated incident
field (corresponding to ) from the correctly cal-
culated total field. Since the correct total field is given by the
Fig. 7. Reconstructions under multibistatic and differential configuration
without and with background error.
actual scattered field plus the actual incident field ,
at last the estimated scattered field is given by
(14)
being .
The reconstructions are shown in Fig. 7, and four cases
are considered: The first one is multibistatic with an exact
estimation of the background scenario (ME), the second one
is differential with an exact estimation of the background
scenario (DE), the third one is multibistatic with a wrong
estimation of the background scenario (MW) and the fourth
one is differential with an wrong estimation of the background
scenario (DW).
From Fig. 7, we can see that, if we have at disposal a reli-
able calculation of the scattered field (in particular an accurate
knowledge of the background scenario) the two reconstructions
ME and DE agree with the theoretical expectations. In fact, the
ME case is characterized by a low pass horizontal filtering so
that the upper side of the object is well reconstructed, whereas
the reconstruction in the DE exhibits two peaks in correspon-
dence of the edges of the upper side of the object. However,
if we have an uncertainty about the incident field (in partic-
the background scenario), then the differential configuration ap-
pears much more robust. In fact, the MW reconstruction is very
poor because the artifact in the deeper part of the observation do-
main gives a dominant contribution on the reconstructed image.
This happens because the term of (14) is stronger than the
useful term associated to the buried object. For the homol-
ogous differential reconstruction DW we observe an undesired
shift of the reconstruction along the depth due to the incorrect
dielectric permittivity assumed in the model. However, the DW
reconstruction is certainly clearer and cleaner than the MW re-
construction, because the term does not affect the data
any longer. Let us note that this example can be representative
PERSICO AND SOLDOVIERI: A MICROWAVE TOMOGRAPHY APPROACH
Fig. 8. Reconstructions of a horizontally long object under the four considered
configurations M1 M1 D1 D1
; ; ; .
of a realistic situation where slow spatial variation of the back-
ground scenario occurs, so that we have an erroneous estima-
tion of the permittivity of the soil because we have measured it
“elsewhere.”
In order to show an example that puts into evidence the
considerations worked out in Sections IV and V about the
properties of the involved operators, the reconstruction of an
object horizontally “long” with respect to the offset is proposed.
Since we are focused on the properties of the operator, in
this example model data (evaluated according to BA) will be
exploited. The reconstruction of an object sized 1 0.2 m
at the depth of 0.6 m is considered (see Fig. 8). The object
shows a relative permittivity equal to 9.1 and a conductivity
equal to 0.01 S/m. The parameters of the test are the same
of those accounted for the SVD considered in Section V. In
particular, the object is a weak scatterer and this justifies the
use of model data. The same four cases , but, on the other hand, changes and somehow worsens the prop-
and of Figs. 5 and 6 have been considered, and the
reconstructions are shown in Fig. 8. From Fig. 8, it can be
seen that the reconstruction in the multibistatic cases
and are very similar to each other, and this confirms
the fact that the value of the offset plays a marginal role
in this case. The differential reconstructions, instead, exhibit
a marked band-pass filtering behavior along the horizontal
direction, so that they are characterized by two peaks about
the edges of the objects. The reconstruction is worse
than the reconstruction due to the smaller amount of
independent data (see Fig. 5). Finally, it also can be noted that
the differential reconstructions presents two null points at the
lateral edges of the object, whereas the “maxima” in the case
are farther from the edge of the object with respect to the
case , according to the qualitative reasoning of Section IV.
Finally, we find interesting to present a further test-case in
order to show the reliability of the reconstruction approach and
the validity of the previous considerations also in the case of
3547
Fig. 9. Reconstruction of a horizontal long void with model data (upper panel)
and exact data (lower panel).
data with high model error. The object is a void with the same
location and size of that of Fig. 8. The spatial step of the mea-
surements is 0.05 m and the offset is 0.1 m, while the other pa-
rameters are unchanged with respect to the previous examples
of Fig. 8. Fig. 9 depicts a comparison between the differential
reconstructions obtained with no model error (upper panel) and
with exact (non linear) data (lower panel). As it can be seen,
despite of the high model error, the lower plot of Fig. 9 allows
to point out “the geometry” of the object in a similar way with
respect to the case of no model error.
VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper we have discussed a microwave tomography ap-
proach exploiting a differential configuration for GPR data in
frequency domain. This differential configuration allows to mit-
igate some bad effects of uncertainties on the reference scenario
erties of the involved scattering operator. Also, we have shown
that a-priori information about the size of the looked objects
can be particularly important in the framework of a differential
configuration. Future works will be devised to do experimental
tests. In particular, situations of interest for a differential con-
figurations could be those with shallow object [24] and/or with
objects embedded in a wall.
APPENDIX A
The Green’s function of the problem is given by [22]
(A1)
where and are defined in the main text [see (7)].
3548 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006
The incident (or unperturbed) field is given by [22]
(A2)
where is the impressed current and is the frequency.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank Dr. L. Crocco and Dr. I. Catapano for pro-
viding the numerical code for the forward problem.
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Raffaele Persico was born in Naples, Italy, on May
15, 1969. He received the Electronic Engineering
degree (summa cum laude) from the University of
Naples Federico II in 1996 and the Ph.D. degree
from the Second University of Naples in 1999.
Previously, he was a Research Scientist in the Con-
sortium for Advanced Research in Remote Sensing
Systems CO.RI.S.T.A. In December 2001, he joined
the Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the
Environment (I.R.E.A.), which is part of the Italian
National Council of Researches (C.N.R.). His main
interests are linear and non linear inverse scattering problems, especially in re-
lationship with GPR data processing and GPR systems.
Dr. Persico is a member of Centro di Chimica, Fisica Geologia e Ingegneria
(CICFGIA), Lecce, Italy, (Dipartimento di Scienza dei Materiali), and of the
Association of Italian-German Studies, Merano, Italy. He is a Reviewer for the
IEEE and other international journals.
Francesco Soldovieri received the Laurea degree
in electronic engineering from the University of
Salerno, Salerno, Italy, in 1992 and the Ph.D. degree
in electronic engineering from the University of
Naples “Federico II,” Naples, in 1996.
In 1993, he joined the Electromagnetic Research
Group of the University of Naples and in 1998/1999
he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same Uni-
versity. From 1999 to 2000, he collaborated with the
Research Group on Applied Electromagnetism at the
Second University of Naples. Since 2001, he has been
a Researcher at the Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment
of the Italian National Research Council (IREA-CNR). His main scientific inter-
ests include electromagnetic diagnostics, inverse scattering, GPR applications,
and antenna diagnostics.
Dr. Soldovieri was awarded the 1999 Honorable Mention for the H.A.
Wheeler Applications Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propaga-
tion Society.