Localización e identifi cación de Localización e identifi cación de activos soterrados activos soterrados mediante georadar y procesamiento de imagen

Abstract

There is a growing industrial interest, covering from the sector of Engineering

to the Environmental Management, among others, in the location of assets and

anomalies in the subsoil in an effi cient way and with a reduced error rate. It is

aimed to increase the security and precision in the inspection of the subsoil by

means of non-invasive and fast methods that could replace more traditional

methods of direct digging.

Nowadays, there is a wide range of sensors that can be used. One of them is the

georadar, Ground Penetrating Radar, from now on GPR, used in many different

disciplines such as archaeology, hydrology, forensics, engineering and civil

engineering, among others. The geophysical prospection with GPR is a technology

capable of solving the problem inherent to the knowledge of the subsoil. It allows

characterising perfectly the subsoil and the structures inside, in an effi cient and

accurate way, with a minimum impact.

As long as the technology goes forward, in many aspects of our life, it is possible to

accomplish several tasks in a fast, effi cient and automated way. Image processing

has consolidated as a reliable technology installed in a wide number of applications

for different problems. The high accuracy and resolution of the actual cameras, as

long as with the fast communication protocols and the services of the computers

make possible to solve diffi cult problems, usually hand-crafted in the near past.

In this article, we present an image processing application whose aim is to locate

and identify the buried assets that can be found in a subsoil survey. Therefore,

image processing techniques are applied to interpret the electromagnetic signals

coming from georadar.

First, the problem to be solved is shown, and some of the approaches to the

problem are enumerated, which have been tackled during last years. Next, the

proposed solution is thoroughly detailed together with their constituting elements,

also the obtained results and the conclusions extracted from this work are exposed.