Terracing gravity and magnetic data using edge-preserving smoothing filters

One major purpose of gravity and magnetic transformations is to produce a result that can be related to geology. The terracing operator achieves this purpose by converting gravity and magnetic data into a geologic map-like field wherein homogeneous domains with sharp domain boundaries are defined. Edge-preserving smoothing filters developed in image processing have the same capability. I have applied the Kuwahara, mean of least variance, and symmetric nearest neighbor filters to gravity and magnetic data. Synthetic and field data examples suggest that these edge-preserving smoothing filters produce terraced effects cleaner than the terracing operator, and the mean of least variance filter often produces the cleanest and sharpest result.