AbstractsEngineering

This thesis discusses research in the automation of reading a utility meter. Thehardware required is a wireless camera pointed at the meter to be read. This meter can be a water, electricity or gas meter. After the wireless camera collects the image from the utility meter it transmits the image to a computer through a receiver. The computer analyzes the image with pattern recognition technology to obtain the numbers. We use image processing techniques in this thesis, including image preprocessing, image segmentation (Otsu threshold method), and number recognition. Finally we create a graphical user interface using Visual C#.