Android Application for Automating the CEB Meter Reading System

Abstract

Currently CEB is facing quite a lot of problems in obtaining meter reading from customers due to circumstances such as house owner is out of the house by the time the reader visits or because the readers undergo difficulties in reaching the meter due to pets of house owners such as dogs. Hence the objective of this research is to develop a system to automate the process of obtaining the meter reading to cater the identified issue. To address this matter a method inculcating an android application and an image processing techniques is proposed. So the basic idea behind the research is developing an application through which the CEB meter reading can be directly uploaded to the database by capturing an image of the household electric meter using a mobile phone. This process is divided into four steps; Android app development, web service to send the image to server, image processing and bill calculation. Image processing which is the core area of this research is carried out via MATLAB. The system is developed to suit different higher android versions starting from the android version "honeycomb". The number recognition capability of this image processing technique is tested for 110 different real samples of images obtained from phone cameras with different resolutions. Accuracy of detection of individual digits has been tested and an overall success rate of 90% is obtained.