Abstract: In order to realize 3D interpretation for water-containing or water-conductive structures in coal mine,further to prevent and reduce the occurrence of mine water hazards,a research on a 3D electrical resistivity inversion and ima- ging technology for coal mine was carried out. By using a whole space 3D resistivity inversion software to get inversion and imaging results for synthetic water-containing or water-conductive models,the inversion results for different survey systems,data sampling density,model parameters,and noise levels were compared and analyzed. A 3D inversion and imaging for a complex synthetic model was also conducted. Results show that a multi-tunnel perspective survey system achieves a higher inversion resolution. When transmitting electrode distance is larger than,and receiving electrode dis- tance is smaller than anomaly size,high inversion resolution could be maintained under low data sampling density. Re- sistivity obtained by inversion is a combination of model’ s size,resistivity,depth,horizontal position,and background resistivity and so on. The influence of tunnel space is equal to about 2% random noise,and inversion results possess a good ability of noise resistance. According to inversion and imaging results,multi-bodies could be identified separately, and the 3D distribution range of the anomaly could also be determined. Although it is hard to precisely define the a- nomaly boundary,resistivity iso-surface could be used to extract the anomaly.