Assessing The Quality of Electromagnetic Data for The Discrimination of UXO Using Figures of Merit

摘要

The need for assessing data quality in unexploded ordnance (UXO) remediation problems arises from two sources. In the planning stage it is essential that the data are acquired in sufficient numbers and with sufficient accuracy to answer the detection or discrimination problem of relevance. At the interpretation stage it is critical to objectively assess whether the data are of sufficient quality to warrant subsequent processing, inversion, and classification. Faced with this practical challenge of defining data quality we propose a Figure of Merit (FOM). FOM is a reliability indicator derived from quantities that affect the quality of data, such as anomaly coverage, line spacing, station spacing, instrument noise, survey location errors, etc. The FOM can also include informative features of the inversion, such as the variance of key model parameters, and thus it depends on the inverse model to be applied. Anomalies associated with higher values of FOM should have increased reliability in classification. Anomalies below a critical threshold will not be suitable for advanced analysis.