The determination of landforms of the terrain depends on a number of procedures. In general, all these procedures can be subdivided into two groups. The first group consists of measurement activities related to obtaining real-life data. The second group comprises operations related to the processing of results, in order to obtain the imaging. The measurements of the terrain and its landforms are discrete. Cartographic images are continuous. In order to get a map of 3D measurements, contours need to be interpolated. In this publication, four of the many interpolation methods were selected for presentation: Global Polynomial, Inverse Distance, Radial Basis Function, and Kriging. The example of the measurement results for a syncline (a subsidence trough) is used in order to illustrate the comparison between the modes of operation of particular methods.

Mining exploitation has a negative impact on the natural environment. Voids created in the rockmass result in displacements and deformations of land surface. During planning and conducting the exploitation, the range of exploitation influence in the form of linear deformations is being determined. On the basis of mining-geological parameters of exploitation, the exploitation range of influences is calculated. According to the literature, many different ranges of exploitation influences can be determined depending on what has been the purpose of it. Different types of exploitation influence ranges can be distinguished, such as theoretical, damage or measurable. In the paper, the matters connected with determining those three types of the influence range are taken under consideration. The comparison of magnitudes of determined influence ranges is illustrated with two practical examples.

This paper undertakes the problem of mapping a hyperboloid cooling tower on a single plane. Measurements performed by ground-based laser scanning technology quickly deliver substantial amounts of geometric data of the tower’s outer wall. The essence of the article is projection of the rotational hyperboloid on a plane. The shape of the hyperboloid cooling tower is not directly expandable to a single plane. Mapping a hyperboloid shape on a plane is, therefore, associated with distortions. This paper presents a comparison between cylindrical and conic projection of a hyperboloid cooling tower. The most popular method of mapping hyperboloid is cylindrical projection. The cylinder’s side surface is easily developed on the drawing sheet. For the hyperboloid cooling tower, the biggest distortions occur in the latitudinal direction and reach the highest values at the top and bottom edges. The equation (13) describe distortion for the cylindrical projection. The equation (18) describe distortion for the conical projection. This paper presents results obtained from the performed measurement. The analysis found that cone mapping produces less distortion than cylindrical projection for the hyperboloid cooling tower. We think, that in conical projection, the shape of a hyperboloid cooling tower and theoretical conic shape have better corresponding together than in cylindrical projection.

Many real 3D objects have complex geometric shapes in various types of analyses. Image of these objects is recorded in the form of a 2D map. In the analysis, a simplification of this image to basic 2D figures with defined geometry is often needed. The paper presents an analysis of the geometry of a flat image (an image of a 3D object) using regular polygons. Geometry properties (F form, C centroid, S size) were determined to describe the object. Various criteria of selection of the ‘best’ regular n-sided polygon for a given 2D object (solved theoretically) were put forward. In the paper, criteria for describing a 2D object by regular n-sided polygons were defined on the basis of determining the measure of object shape elongation (e). In the ‘blind’ theoretical example, it was tested whether the individual shape measures listed in the paper allow for correct identification of the shapes of given 2D objects. The practical application of measures is illustrated by two actual examples. While in the first example the shape of the Canary Islands is analysed, the second example describes the shape of Poland’s borders. Actual examples deliver different results for different measures. In effect, there is no clear objective criterion for selecting a polygon shape. The simplifications of the shape of an object presented in the paper should not be equated with the object's generalization. Such simplifications are used in GIS to visualize geographic analyses based on the data available in the primary database, because the object will retain the character of the shape in the simplest possible geometry and neighborhood, and does not lose any of the scope and accuracy of the attributes assigned to a given object in the database.