A strategy for the determination of the dielectric permittivity of a lossy soil exploiting GPR surface measurements and a cooperative target

In this paper we deal with an indirect measure of the dielectric permittivity of the soil starting from GPR Surface data collected on a buried cooperative target, meant as an object buried on purpose and whose extent is known a-priori. This tat-get is exploited in order to achieve, from its image obtained from a suitable GPR data processing, an indirect measure of the dielectric permittivity of the embedding soil. GPR data processing is based on a linear microwave tomographic approach funded oil the Born Approximation. Using this Born approach oil two-dimensional inversion tests, we investigate the effect of the soil's electrical Conductivity and permittivity on this indirect measure and demonstrate that the electrical field scattered by a spot-like buried object permits all accurate estimation of the soil permittivity even when no information Of the soil conductivity is available. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.