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Soil discharge occurs when it is subjected to high impulse current, and it is closely associated with the impulse performance of grounding systems. In this paper, a new method is put forward to visualize the inner impulse discharge region of simulate soil (fine sand) directly, using X-ray imaging technology. According to the three views of the discharge region, the boundary surface of the discharge region can be obtained based on image filtering and edge extraction by 3-D reconstruction. On this basis, the ionization parameters (i.e., the residual resistivity of soil discharge region \rhores and the critical breakdown electric-field strength E_c ) are calculated by a finite-element method. The results show that discharge region volume enlarges with water content increasing, and \rho_{0} . E_c$ increases from 100 to 150 kV/m, as soil water content decreases from 5% to 2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]