System Identification Applications in Pavement Permittivity Back-Calculation

The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has been widely used in the road quality control of construction, maintenance management and deterioration investigation for its rapid, nondestructive and high efficient advantages. Whereas, the pavement layer thickness accuracy measured by GPR is not satisfied under any conditions, and the coring calibration must be done. Based on System Identification (SI) theory, sensitivity analysis method and the singular value decomposition of matrix technology, an inverse method is presented to back-calculate pavement permittivity and analyze layer thickness used the GPR waveform reflected by pavement structure. The experiments show the algorithm is faster, more stable and more accurate in thickness calculation. When it is used in GPR data analysis, the traditional coring calibration will be reduced or avoided.