Smart data acquisition system for utilities metering

摘要

The paper approaches the task of automatically reading and recognition of registered data on the utility meters of the users and is a part of a more complex project of our team concerning the remote data acquisition from industrial processes. A huge amount of utility meters in our country is of mechanical type without remote acquiring facilities and as an intermediate solution we propose an intelligent optical acquisition system which will store the read values in desktop and mobile devices. The main requirements of such a system are: portability, data reading accuracy, fast processing and energy independence. The paper analyses several solutions (including Artificial Neural Networks approach) tested by our team and present the experimental results and our conclusions.