Intelligent decoding method for Ground-penetrating radar based on improved YOLOv5

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a non-invasive detection technique that effectively gathers information about subsurface materials. In tunneling projects, GPR can provide a fast and accurate forecast of the geological conditions in front of tunnel boring, which provides an important reference basis for tunnel construction. Currently, the interpretation of GPR images relies heavily on manual expertise, resulting in low efficiency and minimal automation. This creates an urgent need for effective and accurate identification of poor geological conditions depicted in radar images. In this study, we present the GPR-YOLOv5 model, which is designed to detect unfavorable geologic features ahead of the tunnel face from GPR images. We enhance this model with the CA attention mechanism, GSConv module, ghostC3 module, and the VariFocal loss function to improve decoding accuracy while minimizing computational load. Additionally, we integrate this algorithm with established modern object detection techniques, and our experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness.