Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a subsurface remote sensor that allows the user to detect, classify, and identify the buried target and structures. The radar signals are rapidly attenuated as they propagate into the ground; therefore, attenuation compensation is necessary for the visualization of the buried targets from GPR data. In this work, we developed a novel attenuation compensation approach based on the recently developed stepped-frequency continuous wave (SFCW) GPR system, which is a frequency domain sampling system with improved performance in dynamic range, sensitivity, and anti-interference ability. Because the regularly used time-varying gain function for compensating the attenuation of impulse GPR data does not make full use of the advancement of the SFCW modulation, an alternative procedure is proposed herein. The new approach is based the SFCW mechanism, and aims at improving the visualization of deeper targets by compensating the SFCW GPR signal attenuation. We first present the attenuation mode of the SFCW GPR echo, from which an inverse attenuation function is derived to compensate the amplitude loss. For the field measurement where the theoretical inverse attenuation function is difficult to achieve, we introduced a pseudo time–frequency distribution for estimating the inverse attenuation function. A procedure for amplitude attenuation has also been developed. Testing with both synthetic and experimental data return a good reconstruction of the signal amplitude, subsequently improving the ability for visualizing and detecting deeper targets.
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