  With the rapid expansion of urban areas and the increasingly use of
electricity, the need for locating buried cables is becoming urgent. In this
paper, a noval method to locate underground cables based on Ground Penetrating
Radar (GPR) and Gaussian-process regression is proposed. Firstly, the
coordinate system of the detected area is conducted, and the input and output
of locating buried cables are determined. The GPR is moved along the
established parallel detection lines, and the hyperbolic signatures generated
by buried cables are identified and fitted, thus the positions and depths of
some points on the cable could be derived. On the basis of the established
coordinate system and the derived points on the cable, the clustering method
and cable fitting algorithm based on Gaussian-process regression are proposed
to find the most likely locations of the underground cables. Furthermore, the
confidence intervals of the cable's locations are also obtained. Both the
position and depth noises are taken into account in our method, ensuring the
robustness and feasibility in different environments and equipments.
Experiments on real-world datasets are conducted, and the obtained results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
