Practical Approach for High-Resolution Airport Pavement Inspection with the Yakumo Multistatic Array Ground-Penetrating Radar System

It is important to identify the thin cracks within the airport pavement layers. To achieve this goal, a practical interferometric approach using the Yakumo multistatic ground-penetrating radar system was developed to detect the slight variability in wave propagation velocity and/or thickness caused by the thin cracks. In comparison with the conventional common midpoint (CMP) velocity estimation method, the proposed method can provide much higher-resolution estimations of slight deviations in the velocity and thickness from their corresponding reference values in the undamaged asphalt through the comparison of two CMP datasets. These deviations can be obtained analytically instead of graphically extracted from the CMP velocity spectrum. The proposed approach was not only analyzed using the simulated datasets, but also practically demonstrated at both an experimental model site and an actual airport site. In the simulation tests, velocity deviations on the order of a few millimeters per nanosecond were detected, and the experimental results shows good agreement with the ground truth and coring samples. This method provides a novel way to inspect partially damaged pavement when the thin cracks are difficult to detect using the reflected signals.