Abstract
The increase in the population results in the increase in electricity meter readers to assess the electricity consumption billing. The smart metering or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) requires reliable broad band connections and additional infrastructure. For developing countries, raising the capital for improving the infrastructure is a challenging task. The prepaid meters lose their significance due to interruption in power supply and inflexibility in updating the frequent slab rate modifications in embedded chip programs. These reasons inspired us to develop an optical character recognition (OCR) based automatic meter reading (AMR) for electricity billing. A novel method for energy consumption billing has been proposed in this article to reduce the burden to the power distributors for calculating the energy consumption by consumers. The consumers will utilize their mobile phone cameras to take a photograph of their own energy meter's display with the kilo-watt hour (kWh) information. The image of digital energy meter display would be sent to the utility servers using the multimedia message service (MMS) facility provided by the mobile network operators (MNO). The consumers would send the photograph image to utility servers on intervals prescribed by distributors. The date and time information would be tagged with the photograph when the image is taken. The server will process the received image and retrieve kWh information as text using the OCR technique. This extracted kWh value is archived against the consumer's service number, which is a unique number provided by the power distributors to each energy meter. The current kWh reading is subtracted from the cumulative kWh reading and the energy consumed for the prescribed interval by distributors is obtained. The resulting value is used for tariff calculation based on the current slab rate. The results of retrieving the kWh information from the image have been presented in this article.
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