Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society ISSN:1229-2427(Print) 2288-646X(Online) 한국지반공학회 논문집

The N-value from the Standard Penetration Test (SPT), which is one of the representative in-situ test, is an important index that provides basic geological information and the depth of the bearing layer for the design of geotechnical structures. In the aspect of time and cost-effectiveness, there is a need to carry out a representative sampling test. However, the various variability and uncertainty are existing in the soil layer, so it is difficult to grasp the characteristics of the entire field from the limited test results. Thus the spatial interpolation techniques such as Kriging and IDW (inverse distance weighted) have been used for predicting unknown point from existing data. Recently, in order to increase the accuracy of interpolation results, studies that combine the geotechnics and deep learning method have been conducted. In this study, based on the SPT results of about 22,000 holes of ground survey, a comparative study was conducted to predict the depth of the bearing layer using deep learning methods and IDW. The average error among the prediction results of the bearing layer of each analysis model was 3.01 m for IDW, 3.22 m and 2.46 m for fully connected network and PointNet, respectively. The standard deviation was 3.99 for IDW, 3.95 and 3.54 for fully connected network and PointNet. As a result, the point net deep learing algorithm showed improved results compared to IDW and other deep learning method.