A strategy for the determination of the dielectric permittivity of a lossy soil exploiting GPR surface measurements and a cooperative target

In this paper we deal with an indirect measure of the dielectric permittivity of the soil starting from GPRsurface data collected on a buried “cooperative” target, meant as an object buried on purpose and whoseextent is known a-priori. This target is exploited in order to achieve, from its image obtained from a suitableGPR data processing, an indirect measure of the dielectric permittivity of the embedding soil. GPR dataprocessing is based on a linear microwave tomographic approach funded on the Born Approximation. Usingthis Born approach on two-dimensional inversion tests, we investigate the effect of the soil's electricalconductivity and permittivity on this indirect measure and demonstrate that the electrical field scattered by aspot-like buried object permits an accurate estimation of the soil permittivity even when no information ofthe soil conductivity is available.