STEEL REINFORCEMENT POLARIZATION CHARACTERISTIC CALIBRATION METHOD BASED ON ALFORD ROTATION

In civil engineering, investigating steel reinforcement defects through polarization characteristics is a critical focus in building safety research. However, some polarization characteristics exhibit variations due to rotation, diminishing disease detection accuracy. Calibrating the polarization characteristics for steel reinforcements with unknown azimuth angles is crucial. Our study introduces a novel method for calibrating steel reinforcement polarization characteristics using fully polarized ground-penetrating radar (FP-GPR) with Alford rotation. Initially, we calculate steel reinforcement azimuth angles with high precision. Then, Alford rotation is applied to fully polarized echoes, correcting them to the standard orientation. Finally, we extract polarization characteristics from the corrected echoes, effectively calibrating steel reinforcement characteristics with unknown azimuth angles. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the influence of steel reinforcement azimuth angles on the rotation characteristics.