The 2025 recipient is Dr. Francesco Soldovieri, honored for his exceptional work in electromagnetic sensing and its applications. Dr. Soldovieri, Director of the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) at the National Research Council (CNR) in Naples, Italy, has advanced radar data processing methodologies for applications spanning archaeology, cultural heritage diagnostics, geophysics, infrastructure monitoring, and security. His research, emphasizing electromagnetic modeling and inversion approaches, has enhanced non-invasive subsurface exploration techniques, benefiting the preservation of archaeological sites.
Dr. Soldovieri has authored over 260 journal articles and contributed to more than 370 conference proceedings, covering topics such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR), radar imaging, inverse scattering, and bioradar technologies. His innovative work has significantly influenced the use of GPR in various disciplines.
A key figure in the scientific community, Dr. Soldovieri has served as General Chair of the International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar (2007) and Co-Chair of the Ground Penetrating Radar Conference (2010). He is also a member of the editorial boards of prominent journals like IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging and IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
The special session for the EGU Christiaan Huygens Medal 2025 will feature Dr. Soldovieri’s lecture, where he will present insights from his extensive research and discuss future directions in electromagnetic sensing technologies. This session celebrates his achievements and fosters knowledge exchange to drive advancements in geoscientific instrumentation and data systems.
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a diagnostic tool that well assessed in a variety of areas, including geophysics, archaeological prospection, civil engineering, and planetary exploration, just to mention few examples.
Notwithstanding the simplicity of the underlying principle, a significant limitation of GPR is concerned with the interpretability of the raw data, mostly presented under the form of radargrams, particularly in scenarios that are complicated and characterised by a multitude of embedded targets.
To enhance the interoperability of radar images, it is crucial to reliably model the electromagnetic scattering, so that the radar imaging is conceptualised as an inverse scattering problem. For such an inverse problem, the geometric and electromagnetic properties of the targets are retrieved by the field scattered by the target when an incident field impinges on it. Despite the simplicity of the underlying principle, this inverse problem is inherently complex due to its non-linear nature and ill-posedness. These mathematical difficulties have a detrimental effect on the effectiveness of GPR diagnostics in real cases. To facilitate the application of inverse scattering approaches in real-world scenarios, it is necessary to resort to approximate models of electromagnetic scattering. Microwave tomography exploits the linearization of the inverse scattering problem, so that reconstruction approaches can be developed that operate under realistic conditions with the aim of estimating the position and geometry of targets, albeit with limitations on the class of unknowns that can be reconstructed (i.e. resolution limitations) and the impossibility of quantitatively estimating the electromagnetic properties of targets.
In the talk, microwave tomography will presented under a unified mathematical framework based on the solution of an integral equation accounting for arbitrary measurement configurations and background scenarios for both contact and contactless GPR measurements. Furthermore, the investigation of the reconstruction performance of the microwave tomographic approach for different measurement configurations and background scenarios will be presented.
Finally, several cases of exploitation of the microwave tomographic approach in real cases will be shown.
How to cite: Soldovieri, F.: Microwave tomography for subsurface prospecting, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-21957, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-21957, 2025.
