GPR Data Augmentation Methods by Incorporating Domain Knowledge

Deep learning has significantly improved the recognition efficiency and accuracy of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) images. A significant number of weight parameters need to be specified, which requires lots of labeled GPR images. However, obtaining the ground-truth subsurface distress labels is challenging as they are invisible. Data augmentation is a predominant method to expand the dataset. The traditional data augmentation methods, such as rotating, scaling, cropping, and flipping, would change the GPR signals’ real features and cause the model’s poor generalization ability. We proposed three GPR data augmentation methods (gain compensation, station spacing, and radar signal mapping) to overcome these challenges by incorporating domain knowledge. Then, the most state-of-the-art model YOLOv7 was applied to verify the effectiveness of these data augmentation methods. The results showed that the proposed data augmentation methods decrease loss function values when the training epochs grow. The performance of the deep learning model gradually became stable when the original datasets were augmented two times, four times, and eight times, proving that the augmented datasets can increase the robustness of the training model. The proposed data augmentation methods can be used to expand the datasets when the labeled training GPR images are insufficient.