International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: editor@ijaiem.org

Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2016

ISSN 2319 - 4847

A Review: AUTOMATIC METER READING

USING IMAGE PROCESSING
Sneha Salunkhe1, Dr.(Mrs.) S. S. Lokhande2
1
2

P.G. Student, Department of E&TC, Sinhgad College of Engineering, Vadgaon(BK), Maharashtra, India

Associate Professor, Department of E&TC, Sinhgad College of Engineering, Vadgaon(BK), Maharashtra, India

ABSTRACT
Traditional meter reading for an electricity use and billing is done by electricity board workers from home to home. It
requires large number of workers. Human operator billing are lead to error while reading data and making data entry. There
are difficulties while accessing indoor meters and meters in rural areas. Automatic meter reading is the method of
automatically collecting reading from electric meter and transmitting that readings to server for billing, troubleshooting and
analyzing. Here processing flow will capture the image by using camera, captured image is pre-processed and characters are
recognized by processor using contour algorithm, billing is done by taking difference between two readings of consecutive
months and send it to the respective server for documentation using wireless technology.

Keywords: AMR, Processor, Character recognition, wireless technology

1. INTRODUCTION
Metering is very important in modern life. Four steps are involved, in on-going typical metering system. First, a meter
records the amount of electricity consumed by the consumer. After that a person capture image of meter for each user,
then it is given to the computer system to calculate the charges for each consumer n bill distribution. Meter reading
collection is most difficult task. To record reading of meter a worker visits each house regularly. Many meters are
inside the house So, the worker needs to revisit the houses. Also this method is very old, it gives opportunity for
improvement. First of all, more workers are required for recent systems because they are required to visit frequently to
collect the reading. Moreover, the process takes time because the collection may not be completed when workers visits
first time. Finally, accuracy cannot be ensured due to human errors. Automatic meter reading has been talk about and
used for long time ,to improve the orderliness and precision of metering. AMR is technology of automatically collecting
readings from energy metering device and transferring it to a main server for billing/ resolving. Means this billing can
be based on actual use of electricity rather than an approx. based on premature consumption, giving consumers a good
use of their use of electric energy[7] .
Paper is organized as follows. Section II describes work related to the automatic meter reading. In Section III, the flow
diagram represents the step of the algorithm and actual proposed method. Section IV showing results displayed on
display. Finally, Section V presents conclusion.

2. RELATED WORK
Automatic meter reading Systems (AMR) continuously observes the energy meter and sends data. This is detailed in
paper [1],Who has expand fully automatic energy meter having the potential of tracking remote area and energy
meter control . Paper [2] (2007) introduced working template of system, made to express the success and efficiency of
automatic meter reading, through GSM wireless technology. In [3] proposed system automatically reads the energy
used and sends it to the service provider with the use of existing short messaging service (SMS). The data take from the
energy meter is stored in the database server which is find at the electricity board station through SMS gate way for
further processing by station, provider further sends electricity bills either by emails, SMS or by post. An automatic
meter reading system focus on the design of an energy meter executed with Zig-Bee wireless communication as in [4].
Embedded energy meter is developed in which [6] extreme demand of energy of consumer will be specified in meter
used by the consumer. After beating the extreme demand, the connection will automatically be lost by an embedded
system introduce in the meter itself.

Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2016

Page 68

International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: editor@ijaiem.org
Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2016

ISSN 2319 - 4847

3. ROPOSED METHOD
Because of human involvement in recent method, meter reading has too many errors. Person from the EB take approx.
100 meters photo each day. Then these photos are check to get data at server. Person has to revisit that place, if the
home is closed. Some meters are also not reachable. Another way to take reading is to take average of preceding bills, if
door is closed for more than 2 months. He has to visit the office if consumer gets defective bill, and stand in queue to
get it corrected bill. These problems are because of human involvement. To avoid human involvement in billing
process, AMR is used.
3.1. Proposed Architecture
Proposed system uses camera to take automatic meter reading. For capturing image camera is placed in front of energy
meter of house. To get digits separate out & to calculate the bill for the month processor is used with contour
algorithm. In this paper, Raspberry Pi is used because it is a sort of minicomputer. We cant install Microsoft Windows
on it as it uses a different kind of processor. But you can install several versions of the Linux operating system which
feels very much like Windows. If we want to, we can use the Raspberry Pi to surf the internet, send an email and many
more using a word processor. Easy to use but powerful, affordable and difficult to break, the Raspberry Pi is the perfect
for pursuing computer scientists. After that this bill is send to the server wirelessly using GSM and display on LCD for
users reference.

Fig 1: At server side

Flowchart:-

Fig 2: Flowchart of proposed system

Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2016

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International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: editor@ijaiem.org
Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2016

ISSN 2319 - 4847

4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Fig.3 indicates the meter reading displayed on LCD, processor will extract the digits and finally meter reading is shown
as units after calculation of previous meter reading with actual meter reading along with tariff will show the result as a
bill amount.

Fig 3: Result display on LCD

5. CONCLUSION
Using proposed method we can avoid revisiting house if house is closed . He has to go to MSEB office if consumer gets
faulty bill and be in long queue. This can be avoid by taking photo of meter reading with camera and sending bill after
processing to server wirelessly, keeping the database updated which is hard to maintain manually.

References
[1]. Abhinandan Jain, Dilip Kumar, Jyoti Kedia, Smart and intelligent GSM based automatic meter reading system,
International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT), ISSN: 2278-0181, Vol2, Issue3, pp.1-6,
May2012.
[2]. H.G. Rodney Tan, C.H. Lee and V.H. mork, Automatic power meter reading systems using GSM network. IEEE,
8th International Power Engineering Conference, pp.465-469, 2007.
[3]. Ashna K, Sudhish N. Gorgre, GSM based automatic energy meter reading system with instant billing, IEEE
International conference held at Kottayam, pp. 65-72,2013.
[4]. Champ Prapasawad, Kittitach pornprasitpol , Wanchalerm pora, Development of an Automatic meter reading
system based on ZigBee pro smart energy profile IEEE 802.15.4 standard, International Conference on Electronic
Devices and Solid State Circuit (EDSSC), pp.1-3, Dec2012.
[5]. Najmus Saqib malik, Friedrich kupzog, Michael Sonntag, An approach to secure mobile agents in automatic
meter reading, IEEE, International Conference on Cyberworlds, computer society, pp. 187-193, 2010.
[6]. Subhashis maitra, Embedded Energy meter- A new concept to measure the energy consumed by a consumer and
to pay the bill, Power System Technology and IEEE Power India Conference, 2008.
[7]. Priya Kamble, Sonali Bodkhe, A new approach for design and implementation of AMR in Smart meter,
International Journal of Advanced Engineering Sciences and Technology, Vol.2, pp. 57-61, 25April2011.
[8]. Manisha V Shinde, Pradip W Kulkarni NEW DEVELOPMENT IN ENERGY METER READING SYSTEM
International Journal of Scientific Research and Management Studies (IJSRMS), ISSN: 2349-3771 , Volume 1
Issue
4, pg: 124-129 .
AUTHOR
Sneha Salunkhe received the B.E degree in E&TC Engineering from Government collage of engg
karad in 2013.Currently pursuing ME in signal processing from sinhgad collage of engg vadgaon
pune in 2016.

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