Automatic Spike Removal Technique for Airborne Magnetic Data

Magnetic survey is an exploration tool to indicate minerals, oil, gas, and groundwater existence. Airborne magnetic surveys are used to locate subtle anomalies that are important in subsurface characterization. However, in populated area, magnetic anomalies are sometimes masked by undesirable magnetic responses from man-made objects, which are called spikes. These spikes have to be removed from the magnetic data before applying any further processing and interpretation methods. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for automatic spike detection and removal from airborne magnetic data. The proposed algorithm applies signal and image processing techniques to detect the existence of spikes and to remove them in the one dimensional data. The algorithm is designed so it does not require a priori knowledge about the spike width or intensity. The presented algorithm is tested on real magnetic measurements that represent various spike signal structures. Results prove the algorithm’s ability to remove spikes without introducing any artificial anomalies to the magnetic measurements after spike removal.