Validation study of three-dimensional ray-based GPR simulation code

Abstract

In previous papers (Proc. SPIE, April, 1998, April, 1999 and August, 1999) the authors reported work on a 3D frequency domain simulation of bistatic GPR scenarios involving signals from buried mines and clutter due to random permittivity fluctuations in the soil, roughness of the air-ground interface, and distributions of rocks. The analysis is based on Born approximations. The emphasis in these papers was on simulation of a focused array radar (Rappaport and Reidy, Proc. SPIE 1997), which is a multistatic system and hence its simulaton requires a large number of runs. Simulation of a multistatic GPR system places a high premium on speed, which necessitates some loss of accuracy. Work is currently underway on validation of this code through comparison with experimental results and with results obtained with numerical codes that can achieve great accuracy with very long running times. In the work reported in this paper, results obtained with our code, requiring only minutes of running time, are compared with results of a three dimensional FDFD code, which requires many hours of CPU time for the same case.