Smear character recognition method of side-end power meter based on PCA image enhancement

Abstract

Since it is difficult for manual recording to track the rapid change of indication of the power meter, the power meter images are collected by the camera and automatically recognized and recorded to effectively overcome the disadvantages of manual recording. However, the complex scene lighting environment and smearing character shadows make it difficult to transfer captured images directly to convolutional neural networks for character recognition. A smear character recognition method of side-end power meter under complex lighting conditions is proposed in this article. First, the uneven illumination image enhancement algorithm is studied. Through the estimation of the illumination component of the image, the fusion weight is calculated by the principal component analysis for multiscale fusion, and the up-sampling and down-sampling are adopted to reduce the calculation of the algorithm and achieve the rapid image enhancement. A convolution neural network framework based on deep learning is proposed to realize the segmentation of smear characters, and the final segmented individual characters are fed into a network to identify the meter readings. The experimental results show that the proposed smear character recognition method has fast recognition speed, and the recognition rate of samples with the smear character and complex illumination reaches 99.8%, which meets the requirements of power meter character recognition and is better than other algorithms.

Keywords

• complex illumination
• deep learning
• power meter
• smear character