A new approach for automatic visual monitoring of analog meter displays

In this paper, we present a novel automatic method for visually monitoring displays of analog meters. Our proposed approach is based on improvements of Active Shape Models (ASM) method, to increase its robustness to measurement errors. The proposed approach allows to identify the Region of Interest (ROI) in analog meters, and perform automatic display reading. The proposed method could be adapted to different types of analog meters. The preliminary experimental results indicate that our proposed scheme is able to read the display parameters with sufficient accuracy, as compared to a human reader, i.e. in our experiments the mean measurement error was 0.1020 volts, considering the standard analog voltage meters used in our experiments. Our proposed scheme can be useful when redundant analog display measurements must be read remotely, specially in critical tasks involving power distribution and generation, among other potential applications.