College of Geo-Exploration Science and Technology, Changchun 130026, China

Edge location is an important information of the source, and can be obtained by the potential field data. Most edge detection methods of potential field data are the functions of horizontal and vertical derivatives. The authors provide a new strategy to establish edge detection filters that can improve the resolution to identify small bodies, which use the ratio functions of different-order derivatives to recognize the edges of the sources. The new filter is named as advanced derivative ratio (ADR) filter and balanced outputs can be produced for different forms of ADR filters. The ADR filters are tested on synthetic data and real potential field data. The advantage of the ADR filters is that they can detect the edges of the causative sources more precisely and clearly, and the model testing results show that the resolution of ADR filters is higher than other existing filters. The ADR filters were applied to real data, with more subtle details obtained.