Light-Weight Spliced Convolution Network-Based Automatic Water Meter Reading in Smart City

Automatic reading for water meter is one of the practical demands in smart city applications. Due to the high cost, it is not feasible to replace the old mechanical water meter with a new embedded electronic device. Recently, image recognition based meter reading methods have become research hotspots. However, illumination, occlusion, energy and computational consuming in IoT environment bring challenges to these methods. In this paper, we design and implement a smart water meter reading system to handle this issue. Specifically, we first propose a novel light-weight spliced convolution network to recognize the meter number, which simplifies standard 3 x 3 convolutions by splicing a certain number of 1 x 1 and 3 x 3 size kernel. We then prove the superiority of our network by theoretical analysis. Second, we have implemented the prototype which can handle huge real-time data base on the distributed cloud platform. Base on this system, our system can provide industrial service. Finally, we conduct real-world dataset to verify the performance of the system. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed light-weight spliced convolution network can reduce nearly 10x computational consuming, 7x model space, and save 3x running time comparing with standard convolution network.