Automated reading of high volume water meters

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Accurate water usage information is very important for municipalities in order to provideaccurate billing information for high volume water users. Meter reading are currentlyobtained by sending a person out to every meter to obtain a manual reading. This is verycostly with regards to time and money, and it is also very error prone.In order to improve on this system, an image based telemetry system was developedthat can be retrofitted on currently installed bulk water meters. Images of the meter dialsare captured and transmitted to a central server where they are further processed andenhanced. Character recognition is performed on the enhanced images in order to extractmeter readings.Through tests it was found that characters can be recognised to 100% accuracy forcases which the character recognition software has been trained, and 70% accuracy forcases which is was not trained. Thus, an overall recognition accuracy of 85% was achieved.These results can be improved upon in future work by statistically analysing results andutilizing the inherent heuristic information from the meter dials.Overall the feasibility of the approach was demonstrated and a way forward was indicated.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University