The automatic recognition of pointers is of great significance for efficiently collecting measurements from industrial instruments. In this paper, an automatic pointer meter recognition system based on line scan vision is developed. A line scan camera is used to capture images of the pointer of a pointer meter. Light-spot centroid algorithm is implemented to determine the centroid position of the pointer. The captured images can record the dynamic movement of the pointer, thereby enabling condition monitoring in industrial processes. Experimental results show that the proposed pointer meter extraction method is robust against interference and that a characteristic segmentation classifier produces more accurate detection results than other approaches.