Head-banging: robust smoothing in the plane

The head-banging technique is a median-based smoother intended for use on nongridded spatial data. The smoother is designed to remove small-scale local variations within a data set while preserving regional trends. Several synthetic and field data sets are used to test the performance of the technique. Head-banging is shown to be particularly adept at preserving edge structures and is thus applicable in the field of structural geology, where data often contain edges due to faults or other steep formations