Using potential field derivatives in the arctangent function to estimate the edges and relative depths of potential field sources

Several filtering methods have been introduced to estimate the edges of potential field sources. The selection of the appropriate technique depends on the type of data and the target. Among filtering techniques, phase-based filters are the most widely used methods due to the flexibility of their design, but they do not provide information on the source depth. In this study, some novel filtering approaches are proposed, highlighting the edge of adjacent sources with different intensities by initially removing the regional anomalies. These approaches generate low amplitude anomalies over the deep sources, and higher amplitude anomalies over the shallow sources, providing information on relative depths of the sources. To evaluate the designed approaches, synthetic and real data from the Finnmark area of North Norway were used. The results were compared with those obtained from other approaches. These results showed that the proposed approaches considerably simplify the interpretation of the anomaly maps with higher efficiency and broader interpretation scope than the classical techniques.