3D object reconstruction based on deep neural networks has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, 3D reconstruction of underground objects to generate point cloud maps remains a challenge. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the most powerful and extensively used tools for detecting and locating underground objects such as plant root systems and pipelines, with its cost-effectiveness and continuously evolving technology. This paper introduces a parabolic signal detection network based on deep convolutional neural networks, utilizing B-scan images from GPR sensors. The detected keypoints can aid in accurately fitting parabolic curves used to interpret the original GPR B-scan images as cross-sections of the object model. Additionally, a multi-task point cloud network was designed to perform both point cloud segmentation and completion simultaneously, filling in sparse point cloud maps. For unknown locations, GPR A-scan data can be used to match corresponding A-scan data in the constructed map, pinpointing the position to verify the accuracy of the map construction by the model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
The City College of New York（纽约城市学院）；Hostos Community College（霍斯托斯社区学院）
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a very useful non-destructive evaluation (NDE) device for locating and mapping underground assets prior to digging and trenching efforts in construction. This paper presents a novel robotic system to automate the GPR data collection process, localize the underground utilities, interpret and reconstruct the underground objects for better visualization allowing regular non-professional users to understand the survey results. This system is composed of three modules: 1) an Omni-directional robotic data collection platform, that carries an RGB-D camera with an Ine…
A Lightweight Model-Driven 4D Radar Framework for Pervasive Human Detection in Harsh Conditions
Mechanical \& Mechatronics Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada；Electrical \& Computer Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada
In this paper, we adapt the Faster-RCNN framework for the detection of underground buried objects (i.e. hyperbola reflections) in B-scan ground penetrating radar (GPR) images. Due to the lack of real data for training, we propose to incorporate more simulated radargrams generated from different configurations using the gprMax toolbox. Our designed CNN is first pre-trained on the grayscale Cifar-10 database. Then, the Faster-RCNN framework based on the pre-trained CNN is trained and fine-tuned on both real and simulated GPR data. Preliminary detection results show that the proposed technique ca…
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the most important non-destructive evaluation (NDE) instruments to detect and locate underground objects (i.e., rebars, utility pipes). Many previous researches focus on GPR image-based feature detection only, and none can process sparse GPR measurements to successfully reconstruct a very fine and detailed 3D model of underground objects for better visualization. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel robotic system to collect GPR data, localize the underground utilities, and reconstruct the underground objects' dense point cloud model. Th…
Substantial research has been devoted to the development of algorithms that automate buried threat detection (BTD) with ground penetrating radar (GPR) data, resulting in a large number of proposed algorithms. One popular algorithm GPR-based BTD, originally applied by Torrione et al., 2012, is the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature. In a recent large-scale comparison among five veteran institutions, a modified version of HOG referred to here as "gprHOG", performed poorly compared to other modern algorithms. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence demonstrating that the modifi…
Forward-looking ground-penetrating radar (FLGPR) has recently been investigated as a remote sensing modality for buried target detection (e.g., landmines). In this context, raw FLGPR data is beamformed into images and then computerized algorithms are applied to automatically detect subsurface buried targets. Most existing algorithms are supervised, meaning they are trained to discriminate between labeled target and non-target imagery, usually based on features extracted from the imagery. A large number of features have been proposed for this purpose, however thus far it is unclear which are th…
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Duke University（杜克大学电气与计算机工程系）
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the most popular and successful sensing modalities that has been investigated for landmine and subsurface threat detection. Many of the detection algorithms applied to this task are supervised and therefore require labeled examples of target and non-target data for training. Training data most often consists of 2-dimensional images (or patches) of GPR data, from which features are extracted, and provided to the classifier during training and testing. Identifying desirable training and testing locations to extract patches, which we term "keypoints", is w…
GPR-OdomNet: Difference and Similarity-Driven Odometry Estimation Network for Ground Penetrating Radar-Based Localization
the Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Civil Aviation University of China（民航大学）；Chengdu Textile College（成都纺织学院）；the Department of Robotics（机器人系）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（马尔代夫比赞人工智能大学）
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
In this contribution, we investigate the potential of hyperspectral data combined with either simulated ground penetrating radar (GPR) or simulated (sensor-like) soil-moisture data to estimate soil moisture. We propose two simulation approaches to extend a given multi-sensor dataset which contains sparse GPR data. In the first approach, simulated GPR data is generated either by an interpolation along the time axis or by a machine learning model. The second approach includes the simulation of soil-moisture along the GPR profile. The soil-moisture estimation is improved significantly by the fusi…
Duke University（杜克大学）；University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；Chemring Sensors and Electronic Systems (CSES)（Chemring传感器与电子系统公司（CSES））
In this paper we consider the development of algorithms for the automatic detection of buried threats using ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurements. GPR is one of the most studied and successful modalities for automatic buried threat detection (BTD), and a large variety of BTD algorithms have been proposed for it. Despite this, large-scale comparisons of GPR-based BTD algorithms are rare in the literature. In this work we report the results of a multi-institutional effort to develop advanced buried threat detection algorithms for a real-world GPR BTD system. The effort involved five instit…
Shandong University（山东大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
This research proposes a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data processing method for non-destructive detection of tunnel lining internal defects, called defect segmentation. To perform this critical step of automatic tunnel lining detection, the method uses a CNN called Segnet combined with the Lovász softmax loss function to map the internal defect structure with GPR synthetic data, which improves the accuracy, automation and efficiency of defects detection. The novel method we present overcomes several difficulties of traditional GPR data interpretation as demonstrated by an evaluation on both…
Automatic Road Subsurface Distress Recognition from Ground Penetrating Radar Images using Deep Learning-based Cross-verification
Department of Engineering Mechanics, School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学土木工程与交通学院力学系）；Guangdong Provincial Academy of Building Research Group Co. Ltd.（广东省建筑科学研究集团有限公司）；School of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学土木与交通学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has been widely used in pipeline detection and underground diagnosis. In practical applications, the characteristics of the GPR data of the detected area and the likely underground anomalous structures could be rarely acknowledged before fully analyzing the obtained GPR data, causing challenges to identify the underground structures or abnormals automatically. In this paper, a GPR B-scan image diagnosis method based on learning in the model space is proposed. The idea of learning in the model space is to use models fitted on parts of data as more stable and parsi…
mmSpyVR: Exploiting mmWave Radar for Penetrating Obstacles to Uncover Privacy Vulnerability of Virtual Reality
Southeast University（东南大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Shandong University（山东大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
A DNN architecture referred to as GPRInvNet was proposed to tackle the challenges of mapping the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) B-Scan data to complex permittivity maps of subsurface structures. The GPRInvNet consisted of a trace-to-trace encoder and a decoder. It was specially designed to take into account the characteristics of GPR inversion when faced with complex GPR B-Scan data, as well as addressing the spatial alignment issues between time-series B-Scan data and spatial permittivity maps. It displayed the ability to fuse features from several adjacent traces on the B-Scan data to enhanc…
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）
Ground-penetrating radar on planes and satellites now makes it practical to collect 3D observations of the subsurface structure of the polar ice sheets, providing crucial data for understanding and tracking global climate change. But converting these noisy readings into useful observations is generally done by hand, which is impractical at a continental scale. In this paper, we propose a computer vision-based technique for extracting 3D ice-bottom surfaces by viewing the task as an inference problem on a probabilistic graphical model. We first generate a seed surface subject to a set of constr…
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）
Understanding the structure of Earth's polar ice sheets is important for modeling how global warming will impact polar ice and, in turn, the Earth's climate. Ground-penetrating radar is able to collect observations of the internal structure of snow and ice, but the process of manually labeling these observations is slow and laborious. Recent work has developed automatic techniques for finding the boundaries between the ice and the bedrock, but finding internal layers - the subtle boundaries that indicate where one year's ice accumulation ended and the next began - is much more challenging beca…
Mapping Global Floods with 10 Years of Satellite Radar Data
Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab（微软人工智能公益研究院）；Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校合作气象卫星研究所）
RADE-Net: Robust Attention Network for Radar-Only Object Detection in Adverse Weather
Infineon Technologies AG（英飞凌科技有限公司）；Institute of Visual Computing（视觉计算研究所）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；Virtual Vehicle Research GmbH（虚拟车辆研究有限公司）
Institute of Automotive Technology, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学汽车技术研究所）；mLab:Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学mLab实时与嵌入式系统实验室）
Automotive traffic scenes are complex due to the variety of possible scenarios, objects, and weather conditions that need to be handled. In contrast to more constrained environments, such as automated underground trains, automotive perception systems cannot be tailored to a narrow field of specific tasks but must handle an ever-changing environment with unforeseen events. As currently no single sensor is able to reliably perceive all relevant activity in the surroundings, sensor data fusion is applied to perceive as much information as possible. Data fusion of different sensors and sensor moda…
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is increasingly used in the construction industry, but existing studies often ignore embedded rebars. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) provides a potential solution to develop as-built BIM with surface elements and rebars. However, automatically translating rebars from GPR into BIM is challenging since GPR cannot provide any information about the scanned element. Thus, we propose an approach to link GPR data and BIM according to Faster R-CNN. A label is attached to each element scanned by GPR for capturing the labeled images, which are used with other images t…
Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been used as a non-destructive tool for tree root inspection. Estimating root-related parameters from GPR radargrams greatly facilitates root health monitoring and imaging. However, the task of estimating root-related parameters is challenging as the root reflection is a complex function of multiple root parameters and root orientations. Existing methods can only estimate a single root parameter at a time without considering the influence of other parameters and root orientations, resulting in limited estimation accuracy under different root conditions. In ad…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has been widely used to estimate the healthy operation of some urban roads and underground facilities. When identifying subsurface anomalies by GPR in an area, the obtained data could be unbalanced, and the numbers and types of possible underground anomalies could not be acknowledged in advance. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to improve the subsurface anomaly detection from GPR B-scan images. A normal (i.e. without subsurface objects) GPR image section is firstly collected in the detected area. Concerning that the GPR image is essentially the represent…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；USTC-Birmingham Joint Research Institute in Intelligent Computation and Its Applications（中国科学技术大学-伯明翰大学智能计算及其应用联合研究院）
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is widely used as a non-destructive approach to estimate buried utilities. When the GPR's detecting direction is perpendicular to a pipeline, a hyperbolic characteristic would be formed on the GPR B-scan image. However, in real-world applications, the direction of pipelines on the existing pipeline map could be inaccurate, and it is hard to ensure the moving direction of GPR to be actually perpendicular to underground pipelines. In this paper, a novel model is proposed to estimate the direction and radius of pipeline and revise the existing pipeline map from GPR …
Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing（信息工程测绘与遥感国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering（计算机科学与信息工程学院）；Hangzhou International Innovation Institute（杭州国际创新研究院）；Oriental Space Port Research Institute（东方航天港研究院）；Hubei Luojia Laboratory（湖北珞珈实验室）
