The stand meter extraction of kWh-meter

The electricity bill of postpaid kWh-meter is calculated from the recorded number of stand meter of kWh-meter. Nowadays, the recording process has been supported by a camera to capture the image of kWh-meter. Unfortunately, the clerks still read the stand meter number manually from the captured kWh-meter image. An automated reading and recording process is proposed based on image processing techniques. The first step of the automated process is stand meter extraction. For extracting the stand meter from kWh-meter image, binarization is performed first to get the binary image. After that, morphology operations and vertical edge detection are performed on binary image to obtain the location of stand meter. Vertical and horizontal projections are performed as the final process to extract stand meter from kWh-meter image. Result show that the proposed algorithm for stand meter extraction successfully extracts 136 stand meters from 155 kWh-meter (87.7%).