With the rapid development of electric power technology, problems about high voltage equipment damage and high voltage line transmission loss caused by arc and corona discharge are increasingly paid more attention to. This paper has done the work about the measurement of arc and corona spectrum with its wavelength from 200 to 1 000 nm. We have found that the arc and corona spectrum intensity distribution is mainly concentrated on ultraviolet waveband, whose band is between 200 to 400 nm. This paper has proposed a way of using ultraviolet focal plane array imaging technology to detect arc and corona discharge. By means of using a set of self-built UV imaging system, wehave successfully got UV images about the targets of high voltage arc and corona in the laboratory, radiometric calibration by xenon lamp integrating sphere and target inversion. The result of experiments shows that this set of UV imaging system can be used on real-time detection for arc and corona discharge. This paper firstly verifies the ultraviolet features of arc and corona, and gets radiance of 5.4×10-6 W·cm-2·sr-1 of 6 kV arc in 240～280 nm ultraviolet band from the distance of 2 m by the means of target inversion, which provides strong supports for further study on the ultraviolet features of arc and corona.