Automatic Numeric Characters Recognition of Kilowatt-Hour Meter

Measurements of electricity use can be used in many ways. They allow a utility customer to control electricity consumption (and demand), determine typical consumption, and evaluate opportunities for improving energy efficiency. The most common device to measure electricity consumption is a kilowatt hour meter which can display the quantity of electric power used at fixed periods. In this paper we present an algorithm for characters recognition of Watt-hour meters M1A-T - Nansen model. The proposed algorithm consists of three major stages. First the homomorphic filter is applied to reduce the effects of non-homogenous illumination. Then the extraction of specific area including characters is performed. The last stage of the method consists of using the K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) algorithm to recognize automatically the numeric characters of the kilowatt-hour meters. Based on the experimental results, we noted that our algorithm achieved a high accuracy.