An optimized design of the pointer meter image enhancement and automatic reading system in low illumination environment

As meter data becomes more and more important in the power industry, detection robots are led into substations for automatic collection of the pointer meters. However, the meter images captured in low illumination environments are unclear, resulting in poor recognition of the meter reading. A low-illumination image enhancement method based on virtual exposure is proposed in this paper, improving the dark and bright areas of low-illumination images, respectively. Then the image fusion was performed based on the Laplace pyramid to obtain clear meter images. In addition, the dial area was extracted using the Hough circle transform, and the pointer's rotation center was fitted using the least squares approach. Finally, the straight line of the pointer was extracted, and the data reading was based on the line segment detector algorithm. Case studies show the above method has good robustness in low illumination environment, with high rate, and accuracy during the image enhancement and automatic reading of the pointer meter.