A fundamental study on visualization of location and size of internal defect in concrete using radar images and GAN

Abstract

In order to accurately evaluate the safety of existing structures, it is desirable to obtain not only surface information but also detailed internal cracks information in concrete structures. This paper presents a fundamental study of a method for visualizing internal cracks in concrete structures using GPR and GAN. Specifically, radar measurements are conducted on concrete specimens containing artificial defects at different locations and sizes. From this experiments, a number of training data sets are acquired. After that, we validated the accuracy of crack visualization of the network model obtained by training the acquired data sets. In addition, a FDTD is used to reproduce the experiments, and the possibility of using the simulation-generated training data sets is also verified. The results of the study show that the proposed method is able to approximately estimate the location and size of artificial defects. It is also found that the FDTD simulation has the potential to generate a large amount of significant training data. However, it is found that there are currently challenges in modeling the antenna and non-homogeneity.