This is a tool specifically written to extract possible timestamps of close range lightning strikes from recorded video.

This initial naive implementation looks for changes of the average intensity level in consecutive video frames. Frames which have a sufficiently large deviation in intensity from the previous frame is classified as a possible lightning strike.

This was enough for all the lightning videos I needed to process this time, so I might not improve this tool any further any time soon.

Compiles without warning on ubuntu 14.04 with gcc 4.8.4

sudo make prepare
make
sudo make install

Usage: VideoChangeDetector [options] [-f input_video_filename]
  -v, --verbose                Show additional debugging output
  -b, --brief                  Do not show additional debugging output (default)
  -h, --help                   Show this help text
  -f FILE, --file FILE         Specify input video file to look for flashes in
  -t value, --threshold value  Average global intensity increase above given value
                               is counted as a lightning event

You could also view this as an example application for how to use gstreamer-1.0, to forward all video frames from any video file (in a format supported by gstreamer) into a receiver callback.

Since I only cared about the intensity values, this application only forwards grayscale samples to our callback. But changing it to forward color frames is straightforward (just change the appsinkVideoCaps).

Works on my machine, with my lightning videos. YMMV.

Copyright (c) 2016 Simon Gustafsson (www.optisimon.com)

Do whatever you like with this code, but please refer to me as the original author.