Wavefield Reconstruction Inversion of GPR Data for Permittivity and Conductivity Models in the Frequency Domain Based on Modified Total Variation Regularization

The full-waveform inversion (FWI) of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data yields promise for quantitatively characterizing the parameters of the Earth's shallow subsurface. However, conventional FWI is highly nonlinear and suffers from cycle skipping once the low-frequency data are missed or the initial model is poor. Furthermore, having limited prior knowledge of the subsurface in GPR measurements increases the ill-posedness of the inverse problem. Wavefield reconstruction inversion (WRI), which mitigates cycle skipping, extends the FWI search space by relaxing the wave equation constraint, reduces the nonlinearity, and is less sensitive to the initial model. In this article, we extend WRI to the 2-D frequency-domain imaging of on-ground GPR data. To improve the inversion stability and mitigate the ill-posedness, we utilize modified total variation (MTV) regularization to constrain the inverted models. With a simple numerical example, we first investigate the effects of the penalty parameter, initial models, and MTV regularization on WRI and further discuss the differences between WRI and FWI. Then, we analyze the sensitivity of the proposed approach to the frequency component and noise in a multiple-targets model. Furthermore, we assess our method with a complex synthetic example containing noise-contaminated data, showing that our proposed approach works efficiently even given noisy GPR data. Therefore, the reasonable combination of WRI and MTV regularization can improve the accuracy and efficiency of imaging for on-ground GPR data. This joint approach for the multiparameter quantitative reconstruction of GPR data ultimately exhibits good applicability and strong robustness and is worthy of promotion. © 1980-2012 IEEE.