Automatic electricity meter reading based on image processing

This paper introduces a system based on image processing to obtain efficiently and accurately reading of the electricity digital meter. In this system the back camera of the mobile phones is used to acquire the image of the electricity meter. The system then applies a sequence of image processing functions to automatically extract and recognize the digits of the meter reading image. This image goes through three main stages: preprocessing which ends up with cropping the numeric reading area, segmentation of individual digits using horizontal and vertical scanning of the cropped numeric area, and recognition of the reading by comparing each segmented digit with the digits templates. The proposed system is implemented using Android Studio software with openCV library and has been tested on 21 images of electric meters captured by Smartphone camera in Saudi Arabia, and results shows a recognition with the accuracy rate of 96,49% (per number digit) and 85.71% accuracy rate for the electricity meter readings. The proposed system will be used in the future to develop a mobile application that could be used by the electricity company employees to facilitate the reading process.