Journal
SENSORS
Volume 21, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/s21020434
Keywords
watermeter reading; automatic method; neural network; deep learning
Funding
- NSFC [62072382, 61402387, 11975044, 61502402]
- Guiding Project of Fujian Province, China [2018H0037]
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China [20720190003, 20720180073]
- Major Science and Technology Project of Xiamen, China [3502Z20191020]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study proposed an automatic watermeter reading method based on deep learning, disentangling the reading task into subtasks to handle diverse and challenging environments. The adoption of lightweight algorithms in the pipeline enables easy deployment and full automation of the system.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and fifth-generation mobile network technologies, automatic instrument reading has become an increasingly important topic for intelligent sensors in smart cities. We propose a full pipeline to automatically read watermeters based on a single image, using deep learning methods to provide new technical support for an intelligent water meter reading. To handle the various challenging environments where watermeters reside, our pipeline disentangled the task into individual subtasks based on the structures of typical watermeters. These subtasks include component localization, orientation alignment, spatial layout guidance reading, and regression-based pointer reading. The devised algorithms for orientation alignment and spatial layout guidance are tailored to improve the robustness of our neural network. We also collect images of watermeters in real scenes and build a dataset for training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method even under challenging environments with varying lighting, occlusions, and different orientations. Thanks to the lightweight algorithms adopted in our pipeline, the system can be easily deployed and fully automated.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available