A Stable Method for Detecting the Edges of Potential Field Sources

Various boundary detectors are routinely used to detect geological features such as contact and fault from potential field anomalies. The use of high-order derivatives-based detectors can provide higher resolution results compared to the first-order derivatives-based detectors. However, the high-order detectors are more sensitive to noise and can bring additional edges. To overcome these problems, this work presents a novel detector, which uses the hyperbolic tangent function (HTF) of a combination of first-order derivatives. Tests of this detector are conducted using synthetic magnetic datasets and an aeromagnetic dataset of Northeastern Vietnam. The findings demonstrate that the proposed detector is less noise-sensitive and can produce source boundaries with a higher resolution compared to other detectors.