Automatic ore body implicit 3D modeling based on radial basis function surface

Three-Dimensional (3D) modeling and visualization of ore body are the core contents of mine informa tiza- tion and digital mine. Nowadays,the main method adopted by most international and domestic software is explicit mod- eling method based on the wireframe connection of sequential sections,or middle plane boundary polygons of ore body. Many human interactions are required during the modeling process and the models’ reconstruction is very difficult when new data come. In order to promote the automation level,a radial basis function was introduced in this paper,and a novel ore body modeling and reconstruction method based on implicit surfaces was proposed. The 3D boundary sur- faces of ore bodies were constructed by interpolating the grade data sampled by drill holes directly,without delineating the sections of ore bodies manually. Meanwhile,the inside rock models were constructed separately and automatically. Also,the cut-off grade could be treated as a modeling parameter for automatically reconstructing the ore body models. Based on the exploration data of a certain mine,implicit ore body modeling experiments on different cut-off grades were carried out. The comparison between implicit and explicit modeling results demonstrated that implicit ore body modeling method based on radial basis function has a high automatic level. Meanwhile the ore body models were very smooth without any topological errors. The method proposed in this paper can provide an new solution for the develop- ment of digital mine and 3D geoscience software.