Three-dimensional density and air-rock interface reconstruction with muography: Application to the TianQin tunnel

Abstract

Muography is a non-invasive imaging technique that uses cosmic-ray muons, commonly divided into transmission (absorption) and scattering muography. For transmission muography, the inversion algorithm critically determines reconstruction quality. However, widely used schemes may produce smearing artifacts when measurement locations are limited and data are sparse. We develop an optimized Metropolis--Hastings (M--H) algorithm that mitigates smearing and retrieves sharper, more accurate density distributions without auxiliary data. Additionally, we implement an inverse distance weighting (IDW) approach to reconstruct the air--rock interface from muon measurements. The optimized M--H algorithm is applied in Monte Carlo simulations and applied to field data from the TianQin Tunnel experiment using the MuGrid-v2 detector. The IDW-reconstructed air--rock interface is validated against Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) measurements. In simulations, the optimized M--H algorithm improves high-density anomaly detection precision from $42\%$ to $100\%$ at threshold $5.1\,\mathrm{g/cm^3}$, with gains of $6\%$ to $42\%$ across other threshold and low-density scenarios, together with the TianQin Tunnel reconstructions, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.