FILTERING OF SATELLITE IMAGES IN GEOLOGICAL LINEAMENT ANALYSES - AN APPLICATION TO A FAULT ZONE IN CENTRAL TURKEY

Lineament extraction and analysis is one of the routines in mapping la rge areas using remotely-sensed data, most of which is the satellite i mages. In this study, we aimed to test different lineament extraction techniques including single band, multiband enhancements and spatial d omain filtering techniques. A fast algorithm has been developed for ti me and cost limited surveys in an area with known dominant and/or any selected orientation of lineaments. During the study for single band a nalysis, histogram equalization and stretching, for multiband, Princip al Components Analysis (PCA) and for spatial domain filtering Prewitt and Sobel filters are utilized. Furthermore, we have developed a new a lgorithm which consists of a combination of large smoothing filters an d gradient filters, in order to get rid of the artificial lineaments w hich are out of interest and to determine discontinuous and/or closely spaced regional lineaments. The results are as follows; the number of lineaments and their total lengths are 218 285.3 km using the single band; 255 343.9 km in multiband enhancements, and 347 644.9 km in the combination of spatial domain filtering including our algorithm. The 5 9.17 per cent increase in the number of lineaments and the 126.04 per cent increase in the total lengths indicate that a combination of spat ial domain filters is the most cost-time efficient algorithm in lineam ent analyses.