How to recognize lightning in a picture?

Question

OpenCV

My task is to recognize the lightning in the picture (not yet using training and neural networks). I have never dealt with such issues before, tell me where to start.

Answer 1

To get started, look at the gallery of examples of such images: https://goo.gl/kFxqkW So thoughts with possible solutions will begin to come faster.
For example, it
can be seen here that lightning is some kind of thin broken segment of high brightness (relative to the average brightness). And it occupies a small area in pixels relative to the total image area.
You can try to determine the characteristics of the color spectrum.