3D Reconstruction and Geographical Referencing of Lightning Discharges

Photogrammetric survey of lightning discharges is a very challenging task as lightning discharges are very transient, unpredictable, and random structures. In order to acquire images of lightning discharges outdoors, a stereo image acquisition system has been designed and implemented. Two cameras observe a limited area and autonomously detect occurrences of lightning discharges within their field of view. Furthermore a reconstruction procedure consisting of typical computer vision steps is presented: Camera calibration and orientation, lightning discharge segmentation, stereo point matching, and triangulation are described in detail within this diploma thesis. It is shown that photogrammetric reconstruction of lightning discharges is feasible and that a reconstruction accuracy of a few meters in an observation area of few kilometers is reachable. In comparison with state of the art non-visual lightning detection systems this is a considerable improvement and brings large benefit, as 3D shape information of acquired lightning discharges is extracted.