Abstract: Aiming at the drawbacks of the traditional methods which cannot make the constructed depth models meet the requirement of navigational safety, a method for constructing digital depth model(DDM) serving for navigation using pre-constructed model surface to control and adjust the selection of DDM nodes is proposed. Firstly, the selected depths, the alternative depths, the candidate depth and the pre-constructed model surface are defined. Secondly, the probability and the representativeness of DDM are calculated quantitatively by using the alternative depths so that the model quality can be estimated dynamically in the process of the depth modeling. Finally, the operator for selecting depths is designed and utilized for controlling and adjusting the selection of the depths quantitatively, thus the models are constructed of which the probability of an adequate depth meets the requirement of the navigational safety. The experimental results demonstrate that:(1) compared with the traditional method, the proposed method can make the probability of the depth model meet the requirement of navigational safety; (2) for the depths of which the assuring rate meet the requirement of the navigational safety, the representativeness of the depth model constructed with the proposed method is higher than that of the traditional method.