Multifrequency Particle Swarm Optimization for Enhanced Multiresolution GPR Microwave Imaging

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 55; no. 3; pp. 1305 - 1317
• Main Authors: Salucci, M., Poli, L., Anselmi, N., Massa, A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Electromagnetism; Engineering Sciences; Exploration; Ground penetrating radar; Ground-penetrating radar (GPR); Imaging techniques; Inverse problems; Inverse scattering; inverse scattering (IS); Iterative methods; iterative multiscaling approach (IMSA); Microwave imaging; multifrequency (MF); Optimization; Particle swarm optimization; Probability theory; Radar; Reliability; Reliability analysis; Signal and Image processing; Solutions; State of the art; Tomography; Wideband
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2016.2622061

An innovative inverse scattering (IS) technique for the simultaneous processing of multifrequency (MF) ground-penetrating radar (GPR) measurements is proposed. The nonlinear IS problem is solved by profitably integrating a customized MF version of the particle swarm optimizer (PSO) within the iterative multiscaling approach (IMSA) to jointly exploit the reduction of the ratio between unknowns and uncorrelated data with a pervasive exploration of the multidimensional search space for minimizing the probability that the solution is trapped into local minima corresponding to false solutions of the problem at hand. Both numerical and experimental test cases are reported to assess the reliability of the MF-IMSA-PSO method toward accurate GPR tomography as well as improvements with respect to the competitive state-of-the-art inversion approaches.