Papers › Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Meter Reading

Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Meter Reading

25 Feb 2019arXiv:1902.09600archive 2025-07-28

Rayson Laroca, Victor Barroso, Matheus A. Diniz, Gabriel R. Gonçalves, William Robson Schwartz, David Menotti

In this paper, we tackle Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) by leveraging the high capability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We design a two-stage approach that employs the Fast-YOLO object detector for counter detection and evaluates three different CNN-based approaches for counter recognition. In the AMR literature, most datasets are not available to the research community since the images belong to a service company. In this sense, we introduce a new public dataset, called UFPR-AMR dataset, with 2,000 fully and manually annotated images. This dataset is, to the best of our knowledge, three times larger than the largest public dataset found in the literature and contains a well-defined evaluation protocol to assist the development and evaluation of AMR methods. Furthermore, we propose the use of a data augmentation technique to generate a balanced training set with many more examples to train the CNN models for counter recognition. In the proposed dataset, impressive results were obtained and a detailed speed/accuracy trade-off evaluation of each model was performed. In a public dataset, state-of-the-art results were achieved using less than 200 images for training.

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Tasks

Data AugmentationImage-based Automatic Meter ReadingMeter ReadingOptical Character Recognition (OCR)

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Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

UFPR-AMR

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Meter Reading UFPR-AMR Fast-YOLOv2 + CR-NET Rank-1 Recognition Rate 94.13 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Meter Reading UFPR-AMR Fast-YOLOv2 + CRNN Rank-1 Recognition Rate 92.3 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Meter Reading UFPR-AMR Fast-YOLOv2 + Multi-task CNN Rank-1 Recognition Rate 87.69 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CR-NETFast-YOLOv2

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