Semi-Automatic Approach to Deculture High Resolution Airborne Data

The problem of cultural noise places a severe limitation on the effectiveness of high-resolution airborne magnetic surveys. This paper presents a semi-automatic deculturing approach to enhance data from Northern Ireland surveyed in 2005. The high-resolution data (200m line spacing, 56 m flight elevation) acquired over this highly developed country is affected by cultural noise connected to various man-made sources potentially masking subtle geological information. The semi-automatic approach consists of two steps: 1) Automatic use of Pointer data to locate potential sources of cultural noise e.g. houses. 2) Manual refining of Pointer filtered data to clean remaining cultural noise and minimising geological distortion. The two-step approach allows a quick delivery of Pointer-filtered data where the level of cultural influence is significantly reduced. The final manual cleaning of remaining cultural noise is a slower process that results in high quality data with enhanced geological signature.