Identifying the Lineament Structure Cooperatively Using the Airborne Gravimetric, Magnetic and Remote Sensing Data: A Case Study from the Pobei Area, NW China

Identification of lineament structure plays a vital role in determining the metallogenic area and distribution of the geologic structure. Edge detection methods are mostly used to recognize the lineaments and define the geologic boundaries. Cooperatively using edge detection results of the gravity, magnetic and remote sensing data to recognize lineaments would obtain more geologic information. In this paper, new edge detectors of potential field derivatives are proposed to determine the sources’ boundary, named second tilt derivative, tilt of vertical derivative, and normalized second vertical derivative, respectively. Presented approaches are characterized by producing zero amplitude over sources’ edges and equalizing anomalies from different depths. Compared with original edge detection techniques including other second derivative methods, synthetic examples reveal significant superiorities of suggested approaches in providing more accurate and sharper edges and are especially effective in distinguishing superimposed anomalies. The experiments also demonstrate that the normalization to the edge detectors will make images cleaner and geologic edges more easily captured. Applied to airborne gravimetric and magnetic data in the Pobei area (NW China), the proposed methods display more geologic details and lineaments. Canny, Sobel, and Prewitt operators are applied to extract boundaries of remote sensing image. Lineaments picked by the three different types of data are combined collectively to get a comprehensive lineaments structure interpretation.