Orebody Modeling from Non-Parallel Cross Sections with Geometry Constraints

De-Yun Zhong,Ming-Tao Jia,Ju Zhang,Lin Bi,Li-Guan Wang

doi:10.3390/min9040229

Abstract

In this paper, we present an improved approach to the surface reconstruction of orebody from sets of interpreted cross sections that allows for shape control with geometry constraints. The soft and hard constraint rules based on adaptive sampling are proposed. As only the internal and external position relations of sections are calculated, it is unnecessary to estimate the normal directions of sections. Our key contribution is proposing an iterative closest point correction algorithm. It can be used for iterative correction of the distance field based on the constraint rules and the internal and external position relations of the model. We develop a rich variety of geometry constraints to dynamically control the shape trend of orebody for structural geologists. As both of the processes of interpolation and iso-surface extraction are improved, the performance of this method is excellent. Combined with the interactive tools of constraint rules, our approach is shown to be effective on non-trivial sparse sections. We show the reconstruction results with real geological datasets and compare the method with the existing reconstruction methods.

Highlights

We focus on the reconstruction of an optimum 3D model from sets of interpreted cross sections in the geological field
Because the manually interpreted contours can be used to restrict the boundary of the orebody accurately, explicit modeling methods based on contour splicing are usually the main method of orebody modeling
Based on the above algorithms such as spatial interpolation and iso-surface extraction, we implemented the method of fast surface reconstruction of cross sections using Microsoft Visual Studio

Summary

Introduction

We focus on the reconstruction of an optimum 3D model from sets of interpreted cross sections in the geological field. In the process of orebody modeling, geological engineers are required to delineate the orebody contours for the region they are interested in on the prospecting section lines based on the borehole sampling data, and reconstruct a 3D orebody model through a series of cross contours. Because the manually interpreted contours can be used to restrict the boundary of the orebody accurately, explicit modeling methods based on contour splicing are usually the main method of orebody modeling. Most of the explicit modeling methods can only handle the parallel cross sections of the orebody. The reconstructed model is called as an implicit surface

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Conclusion