3D Muographic Inversion in the Exploration of Cavities and Low-density Fractured Zones

TL;DR

This paper presents a linearized 3D muographic inversion method for imaging underground cavities and fractured zones, demonstrating its effectiveness on synthetic and real data, and revealing complex internal structures.

Contribution

It introduces a stable, linearized inversion approach with Bayesian constraints for 3D muography, improving imaging of underground features.

Findings

Successfully imaged a complex karstic crack zone.

Verified low-density zones with core drill samples.

Demonstrated stability of the inversion method.

Abstract

Muography is an imaging tool based on the attenuation of cosmic muons to observe the density distribution of large objects, such as underground caves or fractured zones. Tomography based on muography measurements -- that is, three dimensional reconstruction of density distribution from two dimensional muon flux maps -- brings up special challenges. The detector field of view covering must be as balanced as possible, considering the muon flux drop at higher zenith angles and the detector placement possibilities. The inversion from directional muon fluxes to 3D density map is usually underdetermined (more voxels than measurements) which can be unstable due to partial coverage. This can be solved by geologically relevant Bayesian constraints. The Bayesian principle results in parameter bias and artifacts. In this work, the linearized (density-length based) inversion is applied, the methodology is explained, formulating the constraints associated with inversion to ensure the stability of parameter fitting. After testing the procedure on synthetic examples, an actual high quality muography measurement data set from 7 positions is used as input for the inversion. The result demonstrates the tomographic imaging of a complex karstic crack zone and provides details on the complicated internal structures. The existence of low density zones in the imaged space was verified by samples from core drills, which consist altered dolomite powder within the intact high density dolomite.