Accuracy assessment of mine walls’ surface models derived from terrestrial laser scanning

The monitoring of highwall slopes at open-pit mines is an important task to ensure safe mining. For this reason, several techniques such as total station, radar, terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) can be employed for surface measurement. The objective of this study is to investigate mesh algorithms, which can be used to interpolate 3D models of pit walls. Experiments were carried out at Coc Sau open-pit mine at Quang Ninh province of Vietnam, and at experimental mine of Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. First, 3D point cloud data for the study area was acquired by using terrestrial LIDAR, then was used to generate mesh surfaces using three algorithms—Delaunay 2.5D XY Plane, Delaunay 2.5D Best Fitting Plane, and Mesh from Points. After that, the results were rectified and optimized. Subsequently, the optimized meshes were used for generation of non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) surfaces. Then, the NURBS surface accuracy was assessed. The results showed that the average distance between surface and point cloud was within range of 5.6–5.8 mm with deviation of 6.2–6.8 mm, depending on the used mesh. Additionally, the quality of surfaces depends on the quality of input data set and the algorithm used to generate mesh network, and the accuracy of computed NURBS surfaces fitting into pointset was 4–5 times lower than that of optimized mesh fitting. However, the accuracy of the final product allows determining displacements on the level of centimeters.