Computer vision application in automatic meter calibration

CLP Power Hong Kong Limited (CLP Power) is a leading electricity utility in Hong Kong. Instrument calibration is an important supporting service for the company. Under traditional practice, manual calibration is being performed. As one of the new performance improvement initiatives, computer-vision application in meter calibration was introduced in 2004. This paper summarised the application of an intelligent automatic calibration system for instruments without computer interface output. This system is designed to communicate with the high precision calibrator using general purpose interface bus (GPIB) interface to give out pre-programmed test signals and connect to a camera through the PXI-1490 interface card to capture meter readings in image format and then convert to digital format for test data verification in computer automatically. Now, the company is enjoying the benefits from the system in terms of eliminated human calibration errors and reduced operating costs.