Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is able to identify leaks in buried water pipes by detecting anomalies in the depth of the pipe as the radar propagation velocity changes due to soil saturation with leaking water. In the framework of the WBGreen research program, SENSPORT project funded by Région Wallonne proposed a radar system to detect the water leaks underground. SENSPORT entails the four following challenges: (1) high-resolution 3D subsurface imaging and automated object detection, (2) full-wave inversion of the radar data to retrieve medium properties, (3) ergonomic visualisation, and (4) optimal radar antenna design.
Fast Ground Coupling Matrix (FGCM) is a novel fast technique to account for the effect of an arbitrary soil permittivity in the analysis of Ground Penetrating Radar antennas in the presence of a flat layered ground. The novelty of the method consists of obtaining a specific contribution of the ground to the Method of Moments (MoM) impedance matrix through an efficient multiplication of radiation patterns of the basis/testing functions and the reflection coefficients in spectral domain [1].