Lightweight CNN based Meter Digit Recognition

Abstract

Image processing is one of the major techniques that are used for computer vision. Nowadays, researchers are using machine learning and deep learning for the aforementioned task. In recent years, digit recognition tasks, i.e., automatic meter recognition approach using electric or water meters, have been studied several times. However, two major issues arise when we talk about previous studies: first, the use of the deep learning technique, which includes a large number of parameters that increase the computational cost and consume more power; and second, recent studies are limited to the detection of digits and not storing or providing detected digits to a database or mobile applications. This paper proposes a system that can detect the digital number of meter readings using a lightweight deep neural network (DNN) for low power consumption and send those digits to an Android mobile application in real-time to store them and make life easy. The proposed lightweight DNN is computationally inexpensive and exhibits accuracy similar to those of conventional DNNs.