Subsurface anomaly detection utilizing synthetic GPR images and deep learning model

One major advantage of ground penetrating radar (GPR) over other field test methods is its ability to obtain subsurface images of roads in an efficient and non-intrusive manner. Not only can the strata of pavement structure be retrieved from the GPR scan images, but also various irregularities, such as cracks and internal cavities. This article introduces a deep learning-based approach, focusing on detecting subsurface cracks by recognizing their distinctive hyperbolic signatures in the GPR scan images. Given the limited road sections that contain target features, two data augmentation methods, i.e., feature insertion and generation, are implemented, resulting in 9,174 GPR scan images. One of the most popular real-time object detection models, You Only Learn One Representation (YOLOR), is trained for detecting the target features for two types of subsurface cracks: bottom cracks and full cracks from the GPR scan images. The former represents partial cracks initiated from the bottom of the asphalt layer or base layers, while the latter includes extended cracks that penetrate these layers. Our experiments show the test average precisions of 0.769, 0.803 and 0.735 for all cracks, bottom cracks, and full cracks, respectively. This demonstrates the practicality of deep learning-based methods in detecting subsurface cracks from GPR scan images.