Development of cart-mounted pulsed radar imaging platform for near-surface geophysical surveys

This paper presents a cart-mounted pulsed radar imaging system designed for near-surface sensing in cluttered environments. The platform integrates antipodal Vivaldi antennas, a multi-channel transceiver, and a portable hardware design to enable mobile and wide-area operation. The collected radar data are modeled as a complex matrix spanning slow-time frames and fast-time samples, allowing singular value decomposition-based suppression of dominant ground reflections. A dedicated processing chain, including loop-back reference calibration for delay compensation and matched filtering for accurate range alignment, enhances target localization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system produces clear B-scan images and successfully reveals subsurface targets with improved visibility, confirming the effectiveness of combining mobility, multi-channel acquisition, and low-rank clutter suppression into a compact radar imaging platform.