Influence of bark surface roughness on tree trunk radar inspection

Abstract

Microwave radar testing of tree trunks is one of the ways for the trunk interior evaluation. The interpretation of the radar images can be a very complex task -among others due to the roughness of the tree bark. This paper studies the influence of a surface roughness on radar data of observed cylindrical objects, trees in particular. During our study, we did numerical simulations and laboratory measurements to compare radar data obtained by testing a cylinder with a smooth and an irregular surface. Then, several real trees with different surfaces and internal structures were tested to validate our findings. Those experiments indicate that the presence of a rough and irregular bark can significantly inhibit our ability to study the internal structure of the tree with the radar. On the other hand, if the bark is smooth, it is possible to infer the internal composition of the tree even for highly heterogeneous specimens.

Editorial and Preface

“…The issue is opened with a paper entitled "Influence of bark surface roughness on tree trunk radar inspection," authored by Jana Jezova and Sébastien Lambot [1]. The paper deals with microwave radar testing of tree trunks for the evaluation of their internal structure, with a main focus on investigating how the surface roughness of a trunk influences radar data.…”

Diagnosing Emerging Infectious Diseases of Trees Using Ground Penetrating Radar

“…Exploration geophysics and non-destructive testing (NDT) for wood monitoring [26], [27] can provide efficient and accurate diagnostic tools against EIDs. The most mainstream NDT methods applied for wood monitoring are the electrical resistivity tomography [28], [29], [30], [31], the acoustic tomography [32], [33] and ground penetrating radar (GPR) [34], [35], [36], [37]. Regarding GPR, microwave imaging using wide angle refraction measurements [40] and raybased tomography [41] have shown promising results under laboratory conditions.…”

“…In the context of CO-GPR, -and in an effort to develop commercially appealing and practical methodologies-a polarbased interpretation of B-Scans is presented in [34], [37], [38], a layer-based classification is described in [39] and a signal processing scheme for estimating the origins and the sizes of the decay is proposed in [43]. The main drawback of the aforementioned techniques is that they require manual processing and characterization.…”