Learning from clutter: an unsupervised learning-based clutter removal scheme for GPR B-scans

Abstract

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data are often contaminated by hardware and environmental clutter, which significantly affects the accuracy and reliability of target response identification. Existing supervised deep learning techniques for removing clutter in GPR data require generating a large set of clutter-free B-scans as labels for training, which are computationally expensive in simulation and unfeasible in real-world experiments. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-stage unsupervised learning-based clutter removal scheme, called ULCR-Net, to obtain clutter-free GPR B-scans. In the first stage of the proposed scheme, a diffusion model tailored for GPR data augmentation is employed to generate a diverse set of raw B-scans from the input random noise. With the augmented dataset, the second stage of the proposed scheme uses a contrastive learning-based generative adversarial network to learn and estimate clutter patterns in the raw B-scan. The clutter-free B-scan is then obtained by subtracting the clutter pattern from the raw B-scan. The training of the two-stage network only requires a small set of raw B-scans and clutter-only B-scans that are readily available in real-world applications. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results on simulation and measurement data demonstrate that the proposed method has superior clutter removal accuracy and generalizability and outperforms existing algebraic techniques and supervised learning-based methods with limited training data by a large margin. With its high clutter suppression capability and low training data requirements, the proposed method is well-suited to remove clutter and restore target responses in real-world GPR applications.