An automatic reading method of pointer meter based on YOLOv5s

Abstract

Pointer meters are widely used in transformer substations and other places because of their good robustness. Generally, the reading of pointer instrument cannot be read automatically, and can only rely on manual reading. With the development of robot and computer vision technology, it is possible to use inspection robot to obtain the reading of pointer instrument. The automatic reading of the analog meter should first detect the meter from the image, and then identify its reading. For the instability of traditional instrument detection, an analog meter automatic reading method based on YOLOv5s detector is proposed in this paper. Hough transform algorithm is used to detect the pointer and range, and then the meter reading is realized based on the angle method. Experiments show that the average processing time of a single image is 0.3s, and the reading error is less than 5%, which can meet the requirements of automatic reading in patrol inspection.