An Automatic 3D Modeling Method Based on Orebody Contours

There are two main methods for 3D modeling of orebodies. The first is the contour-matching method, and the second is the isosurface-from-volume method. The contour-matching method models by selecting a corresponding relationship between contours with human interaction, but is limited by weak constraints and arbitrariness. In addition, because of the non-uniform distribution of the points on the contours of an orebody, the model constructed by this method has lomanydegenerated triangles, thus the model quality is poor, especially in cases of complex orebodies. The isosurface-from-volume method requires a spatial interpolation in the region of mineralization. A model constructed by this method diverges from the actual form of orebody, because spatial interpolation lacks spatial constraints. Based on these two methods, in this paper we present a new method that can realize t automatic high quality 3D modeling of complex orebodies.The method converts an orebody contour to distance fields by a distance function to build the volume data, and 3D modeling of the orebody is built automatically by extracting an iso-surface from the volume data. In this way, 3D modeling of an orebody is performed without having to specify the corresponding relationship between contours. We apply the non-euclidean distance transform and the divide and conquer algorithm in order to reduce the time and space complexity. A special unit, a non-coplanar quadrangular prism,is used as the voxel for volume data in order to adapt the methos to the particularities of orebodies. Experimental results show that the method can model a complex orebody rapidly and effectively.