MIR wall surveyor

This report addresses the problem of determining the layer thickness of a wall probed with a monostatic, hand-held implementation of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Micropower Impulse Radar (MIR). Our goal is to locate the layers of the wall, and measure its overall thickness. The physical constraints require the device to be held fixed or swept rapidly over the wall. Thus an insufficient amount of backscattered data are collected to use diffraction tomographic [3] techniques to form images. The problem is therefore one of determining the wall layers from a set of time series reflection data. We develop two channel signal processing algorithms to determine the location of the layers of a wall, using as inputs the time series returned from the wall and the incident pulse. We study the problem using a finite difference time domain (FDTD) computer code to simulate the electromagnetic propagation within and scattering from a wall probed with five pulses. We use the results to develop and test signal processing procedures for locating the individual layers. We study two classes of algorithms: a deconvolution approach to determine a layered impulse response, and a correlation approach. After testing the algorithms on the FDTD results, we down-select to a suitable method