TriView-YOLO: Early Multi-View Fusion for Ground Penetrating Radar Cavity Detection in Soft, High-Water-Content Soils
This study addresses the challenge of severe signal attenuation and poor void detectability in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data acquired in high-moisture soft soils by proposing TriView-YOLO, a novel detection model based on the YOLOv12 architecture. The method introduces, for the first time, a nine-channel input comprising three orthogonal views—vertical B-scan, horizontal C-scan, and cross-sectional B-scan—and incorporates a custom TripleInputConv layer to enable early multi-view fusion, while producing detection bounding boxes exclusively from the vertical view. Trained on real-world data collected via a vehicle-mounted 3D GPR system, the model is evaluated under a rigorously designed protocol tailored to complex field conditions lacking public benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate a mean average precision (mAP50) of 0.558 ± 0.028 on non-augmented test data, with per-image inference requiring only 3.1 ms (23.6 GFLOPs), significantly outperforming ablated variants and confirming the critical contribution of auxiliary views to detection performance.