Ground-penetrating radar clutter removal via 1d Fast Subband decomposition

Target detection performance in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) deteriorates highly in the presence of clutter. Multi-scale (wavelet transform) or the recently proposed multi-scale and multi-directional decomposition based methods can efficiently remove the clutter, however they have high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a new multi-scale method which requires only 1D fast subband decomposition of the rows of the GPR image. The resulting detail layers directly provide the clutter-free target component of the GPR image. The proposed method is compared to the state-of-art clutter removal methods both visually and quantitatively using a realistic simulated dataset which is constructed by the gprMax simulation software. The results show that the proposed 1D subband decomposition scheme approximates the classical 2D wavelet decomposition successfully and even presents a performance increase as well as a complexity decrease for fast decomposition methods based on lifting wavelet transform and a trous wavelet transform.