Implicit 3D Modeling of Ore Body from Geological Boreholes Data Using Hermite Radial Basis Functions

Abstract

Modeling ore body in 3D is the basis of digital intelligent mining. However, most existing three-dimensional mining software uses the contour approach that requires too much man–machine interaction and difficult partial updating. Moreover, accounting for uncertainty and low geometric quality picking is very difficult in the direct contour approach. Therefore, an implicit modeling approach to automatically build the three-dimensional model for ore body by means of spatial interpolation directly based on the geological borehole data with Hermite radial basis function (HRBF) algorithm as the core is proposed. Furthermore, in order to solve the problems of weak continuity of models due to the long-distance original boreholes as well as the boundary-point normal solution error, the densification of original borehole data with the virtual borehole as well as the calculation of point-cloud normal direction based on the adjacent hole-drilling method is proposed. The verification of two mine engineering projects and comparison with the explicit modeling results show that this approach could realize the automatic building of three-dimensional models for the ore body with high geometric quality, timely update and accurate results.