Application of 2D Gabor filter in analysis of the aeromagnetic data at Khoram Abad and ground magnetic data at Kashmar regions

Image processing techniques have been used in processing of potential fields data in order to delineate the edges of the anomalous sources. In this research, firstly the 2D Gabor filter was introduced. Then its operation was investigated on the three magnetized prisms which were at the three different depths and orientations. The effects of body wavelength, standard deviation and body orientation in the Gabor filter on the detection of edge bodies were studied. Investigations showed that the Gabor filter is a low pass filter. Afterwards, the Gabor filter was applied on the aeromagnetic data of Khoram Abad region in the southwest and ground magnetic data from Kashmar region in the northeast of Iran. The results show that the trend of geological structures is NW-SE which is in concordance to those obtained from other filters as well as geological map of the region.
1 2D Gabor filter
The boundary of the geological structures can be determined by processing of potential field spectrums .Most filters which have been used for edge detection are based on the different degree of derivatives. The derivatives cause noises and signals amplify together which decrease resolution of edges. Therefore, using filters without any derivative terms is a prime objective. The Gabor filter has not any derivative terms in its mathematical structure. Denis Gabor first introduced the filter for image processing. This filter is linear and has been used for analyzing details of an image or its texture. The characteristics of the Gabor filter is to obtain special frequencies in a certain point or a region. Mostly this filter has been used for analyzing human vision system. The Gabor filter has two parts, real and imaginary in exponential forms which are multiplied with a Gaussian function. The real part has been used for data filtering. The Gabor filter response in spatial domain is defined by convolution of data in the Gabor matrix. The Gabor filter is a low pass filter which attenuates noises while it detects the edges of the deep anomalies in a certain direction. The Gabor filter in mathematics is in the group of filter transformation. On this basis, this filter can process images in different directions and frequencies. The Gabor filter has many applications in image processing such as texture analysis, fingerprint detection, edge detection, document processing and so on. The 2D Gabor filter was also used for identification of the edges of the geological structures and faults. For determination of the geological trends and faults, we must apply the Gabor filter in different directions and frequencies and standard deviations. In this article, we first introduce the Gabor filter and its characteristics. Afterwards this filter is applied on the aeromagnetic data from Khoram Abad and ground magnetic from an iron mine at Kashmar regions in the the southwest and northeast of Iran respectively. 
2 The real data
We prepared the following maps from the real data in Khoram Abad region: the map of the total magnetic intensity, the reduction to the pole of aeromagnetic map and the map resulted from the application of the Gabor filter on the residual aeromagnetic map of the region. From the latter map, the trend and edges of the geological structures were identified. The other trends may be detected by changing the various parameters of the filter specially its direction. The trend of the geological structures which is revealed by the Gabor filter is northwest- southeast. If the Gabor filter is applied with the other edge filters such as derivative of tilt angle, analytic signal filters, we can identify the boundaries better. The Gabor filter on the data from Kashmar region, delineates the boundary of the iron ore body at the studied area.