The use of ground penetrating radar and microwave tomography for the detection of decay and cavities in tree trunks

Alani, Amir, Soldovieri, Francesco, Catapano, Ilaria, Giannakis, Iraklis, Gennarelli, Gianluca, Lantini, Livia ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0416-1077, Lu, Giovanni and Tosti, Fabio ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0291-9937 (2019) The use of ground penetrating radar and microwave tomography for the detection of decay and cavities in tree trunks. Remote Sensing, 11 (18). pp. 1-18. ISSN 2072-4292

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Abstract

Aggressive fungal and insect attacks have reached an alarming level, threatening a variety of tree species, such as ash and oak trees, in the United Kingdom and beyond. In this context, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has proven to be an effective non-invasive tool, capable of generating information about the inner structure of tree trunks in terms of existence, location, and geometry of defects. Nevertheless, it had been observed that the currently available and known GPR-related processing and data interpretation methods and tools are able to provide only limited information regarding the existence of defects and anomalies within the tree inner structure. In this study, we present a microwave tomographic approach for improved GPR data processing with the aim of detecting and characterising the geometry of decay and cavities in trees. The microwave tomographic approach is able to pinpoint explicitly the position of the measurement points on the tree surface and thus to consider the actual geometry of the sections beyond the classical (circular) ones. The robustness of the microwave tomographic approach with respect to noise and data uncertainty is tackled by exploiting a regularised scheme in the inversion process based on the Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (TSVD). A demonstration of the potential of the microwave tomography approach is provided for both simulated data and measurements collected in controlled conditions. First, the performance analysis was carried out by processing simulated data achieved by means of a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) in three scenarios characterised by different geometric trunk shapes, internal trunk configurations and target dimensions. Finally, the method was validated on a real trunk by proving the viability of the proposed approach in identifying the position of cavities and decay in tree trunks.

Item Type: Article
Identifier: 10.3390/rs11182073
Additional Information: © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: tree health monitoring; tree trunk decay and cavity detection; ground penetrating radar (GPR); microwave tomography; Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulations
Subjects: Construction and engineering > Civil and environmental engineering
Construction and engineering > Electrical and electronic engineering
Construction and engineering
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Fabio Tosti
Date Deposited: 12 Sep 2019 19:24
Last Modified: 06 Feb 2024 16:00
URI: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/6375

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