An Efficient Method for Electric Meter Readings Automatic Location and Recognition

An efficient and robust meter readings location and recognition algorithm plays a very important role in remote meter reading systems and automatic meter inspection systems. A novel and efficient electric meter readings automatic location and recognition method is presented in this study. It includes the following three steps: coarse-to-fine detection of meter readings, projection-based character segmentation and BP neural network recognition. The algorithm was tested on HUALI, KEYUAN, JINLING, LANJIER and SANXING electric meter images. Experimental results show that the proposed method has satisfying performance and good robustness.