3-D image analysis and orthogonal view prediction of electrical discharges

The shape of electrical discharges is one of the important parameters in high voltage protection design. This paper describes a new measurement approach for 3-D shape reconstruction of electrical discharges using computer vision. The work presented here is mainly focused on presenting an experimental technique and problem-oriented algorithms for 3-D shape reconstruction of electrical discharges using binocular cameras. In the feature extraction and the image matching algorithms, we use primarily the observed image features especially the additivity of light at a depth discontinuity, which largely removes the difficulties associated with the correspondence problem. Also this observation lends itself to some physical modeling, which is utilized in the detection of regions of the source that lie along a line of sight. The experimental results are presented demonstrating the ability of the technique to recover the 3-D shape of the electrical discharges.