Work

High-Precision Aeromagnetic Compensation Method Under the Influence of the Geomagnetic Field

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Aeromagnetic surveys play an important role in geophysical exploration and many other fields. In many applications, magnetometers are installed aboard an aircraft to survey large areas. Due to its composition, an aircraft has its own magnetic field, which degrades the reliability of the measurements, and thus a technique (named aeromagnetic compensation) that reduces the effect of magnetic interference is required. Commonly, based on a figure-of-merit (FOM) flight, this issue is solved as a linear regression problem. However, the influence of the geomagnetic field, which refers to the magnetic interference introduced by the non-uniform magnetic field in the region, creates accuracy problems when estimating the model coefficients. The analysis in this study indicates that the geomagnetic field can be obtained by a data processing method based on Gaussian-process-regression (GPR) combined with the measurement process. Accordingly, we propose a high-precision compensation method, designated as the Geomagnetic Field-Based (GF-Based) method, which isolates geomagnetic influence to enhance calibration fidelity. This method restricts the impact of the geomagnetic field and improves the precision of the calibration. Compared with the existing methods which considered the geomagnetic field, the proposed method improves the improved ratio (IR), which is verified by a set of airborne experiments.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s26061867

Authors: You Li, Guochao Wang, Qi Han, Qiong Li

Institution: Harbin Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Geophysical Methods and Applications

Subfield: Ocean Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China