Merging radiometric grids using histogram matching

Large-scale compilations of airborne geophysical data are an important part of regional-scale mineral exploration and in most cases, the compilation involves merging datasets of varying quality, acquired over a long period of time. Merging radiometric datasets involves the additional complication that many older surveys were flown with uncalibrated spectrometer systems. Conventional grid merging is based on calculation of base-level shift and scaling factors for each grid with the grid edges feathered. However, even after these corrections, soil moisture differences between surveys acquired over a long period of time and at different seasons when soil moisture content varied introduce scaling errors into the estimated radioelement concentrations. An alternative method based on histogram matching is suggested as an improvement on existing methods. Source code in Matlab format is available from the server at www.iamg.org.