Development of Position Identification System of Arc Discharge on a Solar Array in Vacuum by Digital Processing of Video Images

摘要

A system to identify the position where arc discharges occurred on a solar array in vacuum has been developed. The system is composed of a video camera, an A/D converter, a personal computer (PC) and a computer program. Analog video image of the solar array from the video camera is converted to digital one by the AD converter. The digital video image is recorded directly on a hard disk drive connected to the PC during an experiment without dropping any video frames. After the experiment, a picture image is extracted in memory bank from the stored video image by the computer program and is compared with a first frame of the video image. The position of arcs is identified by means of repeating this comparison over all frames. The system is built at a low cost with commercial hardware and reduces the time required for analysis remarkably.