Automatic consumption reading on electromechanical meters using
HoG and SVM
D. B. P. Quintanilha*, R. W. S. Costa*, J. O. B. Diniz*,
J. D. S. de Almeida*, G. Braz Junior*, A. C. Silva*, A. C. de Paiva*,
E. M. Monteiro+, B. R. Froz+, L. P. A. Piheiro+, W. Melho+
*Computer Applied Group, Federal University of Maranho, Brazil
+Power Company of Maranho S.A. - CEMAR and Power Company of Para - CELPA, Brazil
Keywords: Power consumption measurement, Electrome-
chanical meters, Digit recognition, HoG, SVM
Abstract
The reading of the electrical energy consumption is carried out
manually for the most part. One of the ways to validate the
measurement performed by the meter reader on the field is
through the request of images acquisition in situations where
there is a divergence in the consumption informed by the meter
reader. However, this validation process in two Brazilian en-
ergy companies (CEMAR and CELPA) entails a daily volume
of roughly 30 thousand images to be analyzed. In this context,
this article presents a method for automatic consumption read-
ing on electromechanical meters based on meter image using
HoG and SVM. The method obtained an accuracy of 79.52%
in tests performed with more than 8000 digits.
1 Introduction
An electric meter or energy meter is a device or equipment
capable of measuring the electrical power consumption of a
residence, company or electrical appliance. The electricity
distribution companies perform a monthly reading of the dig-
its which represent the consumption of the consumer unit in
kilowatt-hours (kWh). Most of the time, the reading process
is performed manually by meter readers, which can result in
reading errors and generate inconsistencies.
The energy company of Maranho (CEMAR) and power
plants from Para S.A (CELPA) use a mobile device and a
portable printer to respectively collect the consumption and
print out the costumer’s invoice. The meter readers typically
record on a mobile device application the consumption dis-
played on the meter. If there is no inconsistency, the invoice
is generated, printed and then delivered to the customer. How-
ever, in some cases, the informed consumption is outside the
consumer’s consumption average or the meter reader can not
read. In these cases, the application requests the image acqui-
sition from the meter and captures the geographical location of
the reader as a record of the informed reading. The procedure
may contain failures, such as: image acquired without a me-
ter, or present image of meter different from the corresponding
meter, etc.
IET Digital Library, LACNEM-2017, 6-7 November, Valparaíso, Chile
The distributor’s critics sector uses an acquired image as
one of the ways to analyze inconsistencies in reading. This is
done in order to avoid errors in the charged consumption, theft
or fraud. That is, it seeks to avoid the non-technical losses that
according to [1] in Brazil represent a total of 44% of the total
annual loss that is around 52 Terawatts / hour (TWh). On a
daily basis, a mean volume of 30,000 images is captured and
sent for analysis before generating an invoice for the customer.
Due to the large number of images to be evaluated, the audit
is done by sampling. Yet the verification routine of the invoices
that were not printed on the field is done in its entirety. In cases
where inconsistencies with the images have been found, the
distributor needs to send another meter reader to the field to
redo the reading or investigate the situation.
Some works have been proposed aiming achievement of
automatic consumption reading from electrical energy con-
sumer units based on images. In general, these works carry
out the acquisition of the image by fixing a camera positioned
in front of the meter, focusing on the region of the equipment’s
digits and then using image processing techniques and machine
learning to recognize the digits from the reading region [2, 3].
There are few published works with a similar goal and present-
ing consistent results applied in a base with a sufficient amount
of images..
Another approach for automatic consumption reading is
proposed based on the use of smart meters. Smart meters are
devices that perform the reading and send it automatically via
data network (SMS, GSM, PLC or wireless) [4, 5, 6].
In this context, this article describes an automatic method
to perform the reading of electric energy consumption in elec-
tromechanical meters based on image. The result of this work
is part of a Research and Development (R&D) project, hired by
CEMAR / CELPA (ANEEL PD-00371-0029 / 2016), executed
by the Applied Computing Center (NCA) from the Federal
University of Maranho (UFMA). The purpose of this project
is to develop a Validation System (SIVAL) that is capable of
automatically reading and processing images captured on the
field, detecting inconsistencies (absence of the meter, incorrect
meter identification, impossibility of reading the consumption
and incorrect consumption) at the same time it performs auto-
matic recognition of consumption.
SIVAL has the objective of automatically processing and
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 recognizing the consumption in electric meters that are in crit-
ical condition. It is divided into several steps: (1) detecting the
presence of the meter, (2) segmenting the meter, (3)Correcting
orientation, (4) segmenting reading area and (5) recognizing
digits.
In this work, the methodology developed for performing
stage 4 (segmentation of the reading area) and 5 (digits recog-
nition) in electromechanical meters is presented. This stage
manipulates a large and complex set of meter images, of the
most diverse natures and without standardization in the images
acquisition protocol (distance of acquisition, lighting, framing,
etc.). These characteristics are even added to the diversity of
meter types present in the distributors (341 types of different
meters were cataloged).
2 Materials and Methods
We present in this section the proposed method to perform the
reading of consumption in electromechanical meters in an im-
age obtained on the field, as well as the description of the ma-
terials used to validate the proposed method.
2.1 Images database formation
In order to validate this work, we used a database of meters ex-
tracted from the Energy company of Maranho - CEMAR and
Power Plants from Para S.A - CELPA databases. The images
were acquired during the critical process by means of portable
devices with Android operating system, and cameras with res-
olution varying between 5 and 8 megapixels. In all, 3886 im-
ages were acquired. The proposed method here assumes that
the meter will be pre-segmented, so all the images had the me-
ter regions manually segmented (forming the regions of interest
(ROI) used) and the consumption value noted.
In this set of images we have 22 types of electromechanical
meters. The Figure 1 shows some examples of meter images
present on the image database we used.
Figure 1. Examples of meter images.
We divided the sample of 3886 images of segmented meters
for training and testing. We use 2000 images for training and
1886 for testing. We divide this way to preserve a big test base
and stay focuses in a real scenario. From the training dataset, it
was selected 3867 digits images, identified by specialists.
2.2 Proposed method
The proposed method aims to perform the automatic reading of
consumption from electrical energy meters of electromechani-
cal type, It is organized in three stages: (1) display segmenta-
IET Digital Library, LACNEM-2017, 6-7 November, Valparaíso, Chile
tion, (2) digit segmentation and (3) digit recognition . Figure 2
shows the proposed method steps.
2.3 Display Segmentation
Initially the display region‘s segmentation is performed. The
purpose of this step is to reduce the digits space.
The segmentation algorithm is organized in 5 steps:
• The search area is delimited: The search space is reduced
having the reference of the possible location and region
area of the digits based on the a priori knowledge from
the type of meter.
• Image enhancement: the search region is transformed
from the RGB color space to HSV [7]; Then the 5x5
Laplacian Filter [7] is applied to channel V, that repre-
sents luminance channel;
• Segmentation of the display: Lastly, the display template
is applied in channel V. We use display templates from
the 22 types of meters to identify them individually. The
template matching technique [8] was used for this com-
parison. Thus, we could use the individual characteris-
tics of each type of meter to segment the display.
Figure 3 shows examples of display templates used in seg-
mentation of the display region.
2.4 Digit Segmentation
After the segmentation step of the digits region, it was neces-
sary to segment the digits in order to extract characteristics for
their recognition.
The Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization
(CLAHE) [9] was used to enhance the images contrast and un-
sharp [7] to realign the contours of the images and leave them
less blurred than the original ones. The next step was to seg-
ment the digits region through the threshold. However, the use
of a single threshold was not feasible since the digits intensity
values in a same image may not be similar
We applied multiple thresholds (between 10 and 240, with
intervals of 10) for the extraction of blobs (candidate regions).
However, many blobs can be extracted, becoming computa-
tionally unfeasible the digits selection in the next step. Thus,
geometric measurements of the blobs are taken to reduce the
amount of candidate regions. Only blobs with height H(bi ),
bounding box area Ab b(bi ), proportion between bounding box
width and height Wb b(bi )/Hb b(bi ), within the previously de-
fined range are kept for next step. The second filtering is the
elimination of repeated blobs. For each pair of blobs that have
a distance between their centers of mass less than 5 pixels and a
minimum proportion between areas greater than 0.8, the small-
est blob is eliminated. After the candidate blobs are reduced,
they are sorted according to the X coordinate value of their cen-
ters.
Then it is performed the digits selection, in which the
method must return the bounding box from each of the five
digits (or six, depending on the meter model) for recognition.
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 Figure 2. Steps of the proposed method.

Figure 3. Examples of templates used in the segmentation of the display.

Some information such as the number of digits (n), and mean 2.5 Digit Recognition
horizontal spacing between digits (dw), which were previously
defined. In order to reduce the computational complexity of the The segmented digits in the previous step are submitted to the
candidates search based on local similarity we used dynamic recognition step. In this step the Histogram of Oriented Gra-
programming [10]. The similarity are the information’s of the dients (HoG)[11] is used on the digits images for recognition.
spacing and alignment between digits. The method is robust The HoG could capture local shape feature while avoiding tex-
because it reduces the limitations such as the lighting variation ture noises. Initially it was found that there is no uniform size
from the external environment and digits dimension variation. for the extracted digits. To make the extraction of characteris-
The ET Energy from each simple blob combination is com- tics invariant to size, it was taken as a stepping stone that the
puted. Thus, the lowest energy combination (min ET), is cho- amount of cells, blocks and angles, HoG parameters , must be
sen for the digits segmentation. constant for all the extracted regions.
Thus each digit is centered on the smallest rectangular
 bounding box having dimensions in power terms of 2, rang-
ET = Eh (bi , bi+1 )) + Ech (bi , bi+1 ) + EdistW (b1 , bi+1 ) + Eth (b1 , bi+1 ) to 512 pixels in length and height, which pre-
ing from 32
(1) sented maximum and minimum dimensions present on images
Knowing that: database. The empty spaces created are filled with zero (zero-
padding). In this way, there are no distortions in the extracted
Eh (bi , bi+1 ) = α1 |h(bi ) − h(bi+1 )| (2) regions and it is guaranteed that the central regions from the
bounding box contain the digit. Finally, the parameters used
for all digits, regardless of size, are 4 blocks, 8 cells per block
Ech (bi , bi+1 ) = α2 |Ch (bi ) − Ch (bi+1 )| (3) and overlap 1. Empirically, the number of directions used in
the histogram was 24 directions.
EdistW (bi , bi+1 ) = α3 |dw (bi ) − dw (bi+1 − dw )| (4) A total of 3,867 digit images were manually segmented and
used for training as described in Section 2.1. From the 3,867
Et h(bi , bi+1 ) = α4 |th(bi ) − th(bi+1 )| (5) images we have: 478 digit 0, 462 digit 1 , 454 digit 2, 354 digit
3, 372 digit 4, 362 digit 5, 350 digit 6, 336 digit 7, 356 digit
where (bi , bi+1 ) refers to adjacent blobs, Eh is the height dif- 8 e 342 digit 9. The characteristics extracted with the HoG on
ference energy, EC h is the energy of the difference from the the training images were submitted to the Support Vector Ma-
vertical distance between the centers of mass, EdistW is the chine Training (SVM) [12] using a radial kernel, configured
energy of the horizontal spacing variation and Et h is the en- with parameters C equal to 32 and γ equal to 0.0078125 esti-
ergy of the difference between the thresholds values used to mated with Grid search method using cross-validation with 10
obtain the binary blobs. Lastly, the bounding boxes from the folders. We choose SVM because literature prove that is a high
selected blobs are extracted and go to the recognition step. efficient method for pattern recognition in many different tasks.

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 3 Results
The proposed methodology method was trained with 3867 dig-
its using the HoG and SVM, as described in Section 2.2. In
order to test the model generated in the training, we used 1886
electromechanical meters images . On each meter image was
performed the display segmentation stages and digits recogni-
tion segmentation.
The method reached 91.73% (1730/1886) accuracy for the
various types of meters in adverse conditions (erased, dirty,
etc). In relation to the digits‘ segmentation and recognition
step, we tested it in two ways:1) only with the display cor-
rectly classified and 2) with the displays segmented correctly
and wrongly. The Figure 4 Shows some examples of the dis-
play segmentation failure. It is noticed that some of these fail-
ures are caused by lack of adequate meter image.
Figure 4 shows some examples of failure on the digits seg-
mentation. In some cases the method segments region that does
not have a digit or partially segments the digit. In both cases,
such segmentation will hamper the next recognition stage.
The Table 1 Displays the digit recognition result for the Test
1. In this one, it is verified that the method was able to correctly
read all the display digits in 44.27% of the cases, it missed a
digit only in 25.29% and missed all the digits in only 0.16%
(3/1886). By evaluating the accuracy per digit, the method got
74.11% (6989/9431) of the digit recognition correct. This is
an expressive result, considering mostly the analyzed images
characteristics.
The Table 2 presents the digits recognition result for the
Test 2. In this one, it is verified that the method obtained better
accuracy than in Test 1, in the correct reading performing of
all the digits from the display, reaching accuracy of 48.73%.
In 26.99% of the meters it failed in only one digit in 11.21%
it missed two digits. There were only two cases in which the
method could not read any of the digits. In the analysis by digit,
we had 79.52% (6879/8651) of the digits correctly recognized.
As in the results presented in Test 1, these are quite expressive
results if compared with papers presented in the literature that
cite the use based on images with amount lower than the set of
images used in this article.
Figure 5 shows two reading examples in which the method
failed to recognize the digits. In the first one (on the left), only
one digit failed to read, and in the second one the method failed
to recognize three digits. In this one the method had already
failed in the segmentation of the digit that was recognized with
a value equal to one. That is, the segmentation failure made it
difficult to correctly recognize the digit.
4 Conclusion
This work presented preliminary results for automatic digits
recognition in achievement of automatic reading of electric en-
ergy consumption based on the analysis of images from the
meter. It is important to emphasize that the images used in this
study were not acquired in the most diverse conditions, which
hinders any recognition method. Even so, the accuracy of the
proposed method achieved satisfactory results. However, we
IET Digital Library, LACNEM-2017, 6-7 November, Valparaíso, Chile
believe that in order to obtain better results in performing the
automatic digit reading it is necessary that meter readers adopt
an acquisition protocol to achieve the acquisition of good im-
ages.
This method is also useful for alerting energy companies to
the possible need of maintaining meters that cannot be read. It
is important that the display area is well maintained and with
the visible digits for SIVAL to achieve success in the other
stages of the project.
Acknowledgements
Our research group acknowledges financial support from CE-
MAR/CELPA made available through the project PD-00371-
0029/2016.
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 Figure 4. Failure examples: display segmentation (A-C), digit segmentation (E-F).

Table 1. Digits recognition result (Test 1) Table 2. Digits recognition result (Test 2).
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0 44.27% 835/1886 0 48.73% 843/1730
1 25.29% 477/1886 1 26.99% 467/1730
2 10.18% 192/1886 2 11.21% 194/1730
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5 8.32% 157/1886 5 4.97% 86/1730
6 0.16% 3/1886 6 0.12% 2/1730
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