Non-destructive survey of pavement layer thicknesses with ground penetrating radar

In pavement survey engineering, ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an effective and non-destructive survey method, compared with traditional core drilling method. Dielectric constant and layer thickness can be acquired from inversion analysis of the GPR signals. In this paper, metal reflection method and a layer picking algorithm called trace correlation are combined to estimate pavement layer thickness rapidly and efficiently. Highway testing shows this survey approach gives small errors, and meets the pavement survey requirements.