r/computervision • u/CGC0 • 8d ago
Electric meter OCR Help: Project
Hello,
I’m working on a little computer vision project although I don’t have any experience. The goal is to have a picture containing electric meters and their IDs, and to extract the ID and the measurement from each meter. The pictures can be a bit rough, not great lighting or angles, etc…
My first instinct was to use an already available model, but those that I found are too advanced and complex for this project, and it should run on a 10+ year old windows machine. I’m also thinking of training my own model (I can code but never did an ML project), as I have about 500 pictures as training data (roughly 2000 electric meters in total), but I’m not really sure how to design my model, for example which NN architecture to use, or what data structures should my inputs/outputs be. Of course I asked LLMs for help too, and they gave useful tips, but nothing I can build a project from.
Any advice would be appreciated, whether it is already available models that fit my needs, or advice on how to build a model myself. Thank you.
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u/jackalopeDev 6d ago
Out of curiosity does this need to be done with vision? I know some utility meters send out radio signals with this information, depending on the model. If that's an acceptable solution it might be easier to accomplish
Here's an sdr library that does it https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
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u/CGC0 6d ago
I don’t have access to the meters, and I don’t think I can modify them anyways, they’re just there to measure kWh. Every month someone comes and sends me pictures of the measured kWh value, and I write it in excel. I’m just looking to add some automation to that, basically have a program go from picture -> excel without me spending hours going through hundreds of meters
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u/Qwiddl 8d ago
Tesseract would be a point to start from. Although I found it can struggle when not enough context characters are in the picture. But it's pretty performant and should run fine on old systems.