A binocular stereo technique for 3-D reconstruction of electrical discharges

In this paper a new measurement approach is presented for reconstructing the 3-D shape of electrical discharges using binocular camera images. Eventually, the orientation of the channel sections and the location of the discharge strike points were found. This paper also addresses a computationally inexpensive matching algorithm to match the feature points of electrical discharges, without knowing the point to point correspondence. By minimizing the sum of squared disparity differences (SSDD) of neighboring features, the maximum possibility for the correspondence was obtained. The SSDD of neighboring features were also used as a priori knowledge of finding the correct pairs of left and right images. The experimental results are presented demonstrating the ability of recovering shape of the electrical discharges using the presented approach