Ground penetration radar (GPR) technology has received in-depth analysis and rapid development in the field of civil engineering. GPR data analysis is one of the basic and challenging problems in this field. This research aims to conduct a comprehensive survey of the progress from 2015 to the present in GPR scanning tasks. More than 130 major publications are cited in this research covering different aspects of the research, including advanced data processing methods and a wide variety of applications. First, it briefly introduces the data collection of the GPR system and discusses the signal complexity in simulated/real scenes. Then, it reviews the main signal processing techniques used to interpret the GPR data. Subsequently, the latest GPR surveys are considered and divided according to four application domains, namely bridges, road pavements, underground utilities, and urban subsurface risks. Finally, the survey discusses the open challenges and directions for future research.

The contact force network, usually organized inhomogeneously by the inter-particle forces on the bases of the contact network topologies, is essential to the rigidity and stability in amorphous solids. How to capture such a “backbone” is crucial to the understanding of various anomalous properties or behaviors in those materials, which remains a central challenge presently in physics, engineering, or material science. Here, we use a novel graph neural network to predict the contact force network in two-dimensional granular materials under uniaxial compression. With the edge classification model in the framework of the deep graph library, we show that the inter-particle contact forces can be accurately estimated purely from the knowledge of the static microstructures, which can be acquired from a discrete element method or directly visualized from experimental methods. By testing the granular packings with different structural disorders and pressure, we further demonstrate the robustness of the optimized graph neural network to changes in various model parameters. Our research tries to provide a new way of extracting the information about the inter-particle forces, which substantially improves the efficiency and reduces the costs compared to the traditional experiments.

We investigate the optical absorption and scattering properties of four different kinds of seawater as the quantum channel. The models of discrete-modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) in free-space seawater channel are briefly described, and the performance of the four-state protocol and the eight-state protocol in asymptotic and finite-size cases is analyzed in detail. Simulation results illustrate that the more complex is the seawater composition, the worse is the performance of the protocol. For different types of seawater channels, we can improve the performance of the protocol by selecting different optimal modulation variances and controlling the extra noise on the channel. Besides, we can find that the performance of the eight-state protocol is better than that of the four-state protocol, and there is little difference between homodyne detection and heterodyne detection. Although the secret key rate of the protocol that we propose is still relatively low and the maximum transmission distance is only a few hundred meters, the research on CV-QKD over the seawater channel is of great significance, which provides a new idea for the construction of global secure communication network.

Phase drift extremely limits the secure key rate and secure transmission distance, which is non-negligible in local oscillation continuous variable quantum key distribution (LLO CV-QKD). In order to eliminate the impact caused by phase drift, we analyze the phase noise of the system and propose a phase compensation method based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Moreover, the compensation is performed on the signal according to the estimated value of phase drift before coherent detection. In numerical simulation, we compare the performance of phase compensation methods based on CNN and Kalman filter (KF), and the results show that CNN-based phase compensation has higher accuracy and stability.