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http://dx.doi.org/10.9717/kmms.2012.15.6.737

An Efficient Numeric Character Segmentation of Metering Devices for Remote Automatic Meter Reading  

Toan, Vo Van (숭실대학교 대학원 정보통신공학과)
Chung, Sun-Tae (숭실대학교 정보통신전자공학부)
Cho, Seong-Won (홍익대학교 전자전기공학부)
Publication Information
Journal of Korea Multimedia Society / v.15, no.6, 2012 , pp. 737-747 More about this Journal
Abstract
Recently, in order to support automatic meter reading for conventional metering devices, an image processing-based approach of recognizing the number meter data in the captured meter images has attracted many researchers' interests. Numerical character segmentation is a very critical process for successful recognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient numeric character segmentation method which can segment numeric characters well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments. The proposed method consists of two consecutive stages; detection of number area containing all numbers as a tight ROI(Region of Interest) and segmentation of numerical characters in the ROI. Detection of tight ROI is achieved in two steps: extraction of rough ROI by utilizing horizontal line segments after illumination enhancement preprocessing, and making the rough ROI more tight through clipping utilizing vertical and horizontal projection about binarized ROI. Numerical character segmentation in the detected ROI is stably achieved in two processes of 'vertical segmentation of each number region' and 'number segmentation in the each vertical segmented number region'. Through the experiments about a homegrown meter image database containing various meter type images of low contrast, low intensity, shadow, and saturation, it is shown that the proposed numeric character segmentation method performs effectively well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments.
Keywords
AMR; Numeric Character Segmentation; Image Segmentation;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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