Desarrollo de métodos de procesado de señal usando Ground-penetrating Radar para evaluar la calidad de materiales pétreos

Resum

In the last decades, quality control in natural stone materials has become a critical task. Non-destructive evaluation is a novel procedure to test material properties without causing any damage. In particular, Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a high resolution geophysical method which investigates the subsurface of the earth and it is able to provide accurate information of the nature of buried objects. In this thesis, a set of novel signal processing methods applied to GPR are proposed. These methods are mainly focused on providing a more useful GPR information to the user in order to improve the evaluation and characterization of the internal state of stone materials. Specifically, the global system developed has three main contributions: characterization of stone materials, detection and classification of defects and removal of the typical noise active in GPR images. The proposed methods can be considered useful and interesting to be applied in the stone industry.