Airborne electromagnetic data leveling based on structured variational method

Abstract. The leveling errors are defined as the data difference among flight lines in airborne geophysical data. The differences of the signal leveling always show as a striping pattern parallel to the flight lines on the imaged maps. The fixed structured pattern inspires us to structure a guided leveling error model by an anisotropic Gabor filter. Then we embed the leveling error model in total variational framework to flexibly calculate leveling errors. The guided leveling error model constrain the noise term of total variation rather than just blind removal. Moreover, the structured variational method can be extended to remove other type of noises which have general noise priors. We have applied the method to the airborne electromagnetic, magnetic data, and apparent conductivity data collected by Ontario Geological Survey to confirm its validity and robustness by comparing the results with the published data. The structured variational method can better level airborne geophysical data based on the space properties of leveling error.