Comparison Between Ground, Helicopter, and Unmanned Aircraft System Magnetic Datasets: A Case Study from the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, Canada.

This paper presents a direct platform-to-platform comparison of ground, helicopter, and unmanned aircraft system (UAS) magnetic data acquired over a 4.96 km² prospective gold area in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt of the Canadian Precambrian Shield. Qualitative comparison focused on visual inspection of residual and gradient magnetic maps, focusing mainly on features associated with iron formations. Quantitative comparison employed maps of cell-by-cell absolute difference, percent difference, and coherence, as well as three global image similarity parameters: the structural similarity index, the mean squared error, and the peak signal-to-noise ratio. The qualitative comparison revealed that lateral continuity along the dominant E–W structural geological trend was better captured in the ground and UAS data than in the helicopter data. The UAS data had the additional advantage over the ground data of having undergone minimal processing. The quantitative comparison metrics were the same between all three datasets. This study showed that UAS technology is delivering the same data quality as traditional survey techniques in addition being an attractive economic and safety choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]