RGPR - A Free and Open-Source Software Package to Process and Visualize GPR Data
Abstract
The processing of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data is generally an essential step to extract useful information. Because of the similarity between GPR and seismic data, many seismic processing software applications were used in the early 90's to process GPR data. Nowadays, many commercial software applications 100% dedicated to GPR data are available. However, those applications generally propose a limited range of processing methods and/or are dedicated to a very specific usage.
We present RGPR, a new open-source software package to process and visualize GPR data. This software package is written in R language, a high-level programming language for statistical computing and graphics that is freely available under the GNU General Public License and runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS. Over the last twenty years, R has strongly gained popularity and was ranked in 2017 as the sixth top programming language by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. RGPR was initially developed to compensate for shortcomings of commercial GPR data processing applications (i.e., apply specific signal processing methods, add topographical data to GPR data, align two-dimensional GPR profiles, export high-quality graphics, visualize GPR data in three dimensions). In 2015 the code was organized as into a R-package based on the 'S4' system for oriented programming. The main tasks of RGPR are GPR data visualization (including 3D interactive visualization and GPR measurement maps), processing, georeferencing (linking topographic/GPS data to GPR data), delineation and import/export. RGPR presents the advantages to (i) be freely available and open-source, (ii) cross-platform, (iii) to allow fully reproducible GPR data processing by means of processing scripts and storage of the processing workflow within every GPR object, and (iv) to export well-designed publication-quality plots. Moreover, RGPR is a framework that is easily expandable and customizable. RGPR, that is still a work in progress, is available on GitHub under the GPL license. Anyone with a GitHub account can submit code modifications (e.g., bug fixes, new functions) within the git workflow and contribute to improving the package.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMNS53A0565H
- Keywords:
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- 0520 Data analysis: algorithms and implementation;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICSDE: 0545 Modeling;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICSDE: 0599 General or miscellaneous;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICSDE: 1999 General or miscellaneous;
- INFORMATICS