A comparative study on different filters for enhancing potential field source boundaries: synthetic examples and a case study from the Song Hong Trough (Vietnam)

Abstract

Locating the horizontal boundaries of magnetic and gravity sources provides a fundamental tool for interpreting geological structures. Many filters for detecting the source boundaries have been proposed. These filters are generally constructed based on vertical and horizontal gradients of the magnetic and gravity data. This paper presents a comparative study of various boundary detection filters such as gradient amplitude, tilt derivative, gradient amplitude of tilt angle, theta map, horizontal tilt angle, hyperbolic tilt angle, and tilt angle of gradient amplitude. The applicability of each filter was tested on three synthetic gravity data sets. The results show that the use of the tilt angle of gradient amplitude can display the edges more clearly and precisely. Furthermore, the filters are also performed on a real gravity data set from the Song Hong Trough (Vietnam) where the result computed by the tilt angle of gradient amplitude is also in accord with the geology information.