APPLICATION OF FUZZY SOIL CLASSIFICATION IN VISUALIZING 3-D SOIL STRATA

Abstract

The distribution of soil classes is an important factor in engineering design. In order to generate the soil class map, fuzzy soil classifications were developed to provide the means to characterize and quantify the soil classes, and then the spatial distribution of soil class can be interpolated by geostatistical method. For establishing continuous class soil maps, this paper present an index of fuzzy soil classification generated from principal component analysis (PCA). The ability of classification of the index is tested with a soil database which including 9,260 soil samples, and the accurate rate of simulation was 91.7%. There are two procedures presented to establish the 3-D soil class map. The first method is to integrate 2-D membership degree maps into 3-D maps; while the second method is to interpolate the spatial distribution of index of fuzzy soil classification directly by 3-D ordinary kriging. These procedures are illustrated by a demonstrated area.