DAMP-YOLO: A Lightweight Network Based on Deformable Features and Aggregation for Meter Reading Recognition

With the development of Industry 4.0, although some smart meters have appeared on the market, traditional mechanical meters are still widely used due to their long-standing presence and the difficulty of modifying or replacing them in large quantities. Most meter readings are still manually taken on-site, and some are even taken in high-risk locations such as hazardous chemical storage. However, existing methods often fail to provide real-time detections or result in misreadings due to the complex nature of natural environments. Thus, we propose a lightweight network called DAMP-YOLO. It combines the deformable CSP bottleneck (DCB) module, aggregated triplet attention (ATA) mechanism, meter data augmentation (MDA), and network pruning (NP) with the YOLOv8 model. In the meter reading recognition dataset, the model parameters decreased by 30.64% while mAP50:95 rose from 87.92% to 88.82%, with a short inference time of 129.6 ms for the Jetson TX1 intelligent car. In the VOC dataset, our model demonstrated improved performance, with mAP50:95 increasing from 41.03% to 45.64%. The experimental results show that the proposed model is competitive for general object detection tasks and possesses exceptional feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, we have devised and implemented a pipeline on the Jetson TX1 intelligent vehicle, facilitating real-time meter reading recognition in situations where manual interventions are inconvenient and hazardous, thereby confirming its feasibility for practical applications.