A Novel Substitute for the Meter Readers in a Resource Constrained Electricity Utility

Author

Ahmed, S. Shahnawaz ; Hussain, Shah Muhammed Abid ; Salam, M.S.

Author_Institution

BRAC Univ., Dhaka, Bangladesh

Volume

4

Issue

3

fYear

2013

fDate

Sept. 2013

Firstpage

1615

Lastpage

1616

Abstract

A novel scheme has been proposed where the consumers will use their mobile phone cameras to take the photograph of respective meter´s display panel along with the kWh (kilo-watt hour) information once a month and send it as an image to the utility servers using the MMS (Multimedia Message Service) from their mobile phones. The server will process the image, retrieve the kWh information, convert it into a text (number) and archive it against the consumer´s mobile number or identity code. The way this can be implemented is illustrated.

Keywords

cameras; image coding; image retrieval; mobile handsets; multimedia communication; multimedia servers; power engineering computing; power meters; power utilisation; MMS; consumer mobile number; identity code; image processing; kWh information; kilowatt hour information; meter display panel; meter reading; mobile phone camera; multimedia message service; resource constrained electricity utility; utility server; Cameras; Image segmentation; Message service; Meter reading; Mobile handsets; Multimedia communication; Servers; Electricity meters; image to text conversion; mobile phone assisted meter reading image; multimedia message service (MMS);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1949-3053

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSG.2013.2264918

Filename

6575181