A High-Robust Automatic Reading Algorithm of Pointer Meters Based on Text Detection

Abstract

Automatic reading of pointer meters is of great significance for efficient measurement of industrial meters. However, existing algorithms are defective in the accuracy and robustness to illumination shooting angle when detecting various pointer meters. Hence, a novel algorithm for adaptive detection of different pointer meters was presented. Above all, deep learning was introduced to detect and recognize scale value text in the meter dial. Then, the image was rectified and meter center was determined based on text coordinate. Next, the circular arc scale region was transformed into a linear scale region by polar transform, and the horizontal positions of pointer and scale line were obtained based on secondary search in the expanded graph. Finally, the distance method was used to read the scale region where the pointer is located. Test results showed that the algorithm proposed in this paper has higher accuracy and robustness in detecting different types of meters.

Real-time analogue gauge transcription on mobile phone

“…The task of analogue gauge transcription has been tackled numerous times. Recent methods fall largely into two groups: those which use traditional based computer vision [3,20,25,8,18,23,9,26,17] and those which utilise deep learning [14,10,11,21,1,16,5,15]. Methods using traditional based approaches are typically brittle to appearance variation in lighting, background clutter and highly constrained to particular types of gauges.…”

“…While many prior works are still using the traditional methods, there is a growing trend in applying deep learning to the task [10,14,15,16]. However, these works often incorporate deep learning in just part of their transcription pipeline, probably due to the severe lack of suitable train-ing data.…”

A High-Precision Automatic Pointer Meter Reading System in Low-Light Environment

“…Zhang et al [ 13 ] used Faster-RCNN to detect and classify the meter and correct the meter image based on the edge line slope, but this method is only applicable to meters with straight-edge dials. Li et al [ 14 ] proposed an algorithm for instrument image correction based on text position, which applies to many types of instruments. The methods mentioned above have a high correction success rate.…”

Text Detection Using Multi-Stage Region Proposal Network Sensitive to Text Scale

“…Recently, attention has surged concerning intelligent sensors using text detection [ 1 , 2 ]. Texts in a natural scene image are useful for many applications, such as translator, mobile visual search, and so on.…”