Coal seam thickness estimation using GPR and higher order statistics - the near-surface case

Abstract

A novel pattern recognition-based approach to detect near-surface interfaces using ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been reported in [1]. The approach was used to successfully detect interfaces within 5 cm of the ground surface. This technique has been adapted for the important task of layer thickness estimation in the nearsurface range. This is inherently a difficult problem to solve in practice because the radar echo is often dominated by unwanted components such as antenna crosstalk and ring-down, ground reflection effects and clutter. Features derived from the bispectrum and a nearest-neighbour classifier have been utilized for this processing task. It is shown that unlike traditional second order correlation based methods such as matched filtering which can fail in known conditions, layer thickness estimation using this approach can be reliably extended to the near-surface region.

Impact of GPR antenna height in estimating coal layer thickness using spatial smoothing techniques

“…Ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) is gaining popularity in the field of near‐surface interface detection and have recently found numerous applications in material characterisation and thickness measurement of the coal layer in underground coal mining [1, 2]. One important application of GPR for interface detection and layer thickness estimation is horizon control sensing of underground coal mining machinery [3].…”

Signal processing for coal layer thickness estimation using high‐resolution time delay estimation methods

“…Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is commonly applied in the area of geotechnical fields as a non-destructive testing method and has found numerous applications in subsurface characterisation of underground coal [1]. Recently, numerous geophysical and geochemical techniques, such as near surface interface detection in coal mines, thickness estimation of coal seam [2], target detection [3] and coal fire detection [4], are developed in this field. A thin layer of low-quality coal is typically found between the actual coal seam and surrounding layers.…”