Focusing GPR Images Collected from Archaeological Investigations along the ``Basilian Monks' Path of Faith'' (Aspromonte National Park --- Southern Calabria, Italy): Analysis of the Performances of Different Strategies

From the fifth to the twelfth century A.D., the Basilian monks gave a considerable impulse to development of the monasticism in the Southern Italy [1]. In that period were built many churches and monasteries, which are a cultural heritage of great artistic and historical value. The “Basilian monks’ Path of Faith” is a religious route in the Aspromonte National Park which extends itself from the town of Bova Superiore to the “Polsi’s Sanctuary”. Along this path is also located the abandoned town of Africo Vecchio (see Fig. 1) and here some GPR surveys have been carried out on the floors of two ancient churches. The aim of these investigations was to validate some hypothesis about the existence of buried structures and crypts [2]. To remedy the effect of the hyperbolic dispersion on the raw data, different focusing algorithms have been proposed in the scientific literature [3, 4]. In this paper, we analyze the performances of four focusing techniques: a) Diffraction summation, b) Kirchhoff migration, c) F-K migration, and d ) SAR migration on the data collected by our surveys