{"id":10043,"date":"2013-10-21T16:07:35","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T20:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=10043"},"modified":"2013-10-21T16:07:35","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T20:07:35","slug":"utility-meter-reader-nice-idea-flawed-implementation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/21\/utility-meter-reader-nice-idea-flawed-implementation\/","title":{"rendered":"Utility Meter Reader: nice idea, flawed implementation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Utility Meter Reader<\/a> is a great idea for an app. Using the camera on your smartphone, snap a picture of your utility meter’s analogue dials, and through the power of some clever image processing, the app will return your meter reading. \"five-dial<\/a>Traditional meters are a bit hard to read, as the dials rotate in alternate directions. You won’t realize why this is unless you get a chance to peek behind the fascia:<\/p>\n

\"the<\/a>There’s an incredibly fiddly set of 10:1 reduction gears in there, so each dial registers a tenth of the one next to it. Because it’s a drive-train, adjacent shafts rotate in opposite directions. This serves to keep the cost of the meter down at the expense of having to think a bit about how to read the thing.<\/p>\n

We only have one dial meter on the house. It’s a 58 year old gas meter (same age as the house) and it’s certainly been around a bit:<\/p>\n

\"gas<\/a><\/p>\n

Here it’s reading 969700 ft\u00c2\u00b3, ignoring the lower dials; the units are hundreds of cubic feet. Let’s see how Utility Meter Reader made out with that:<\/p>\n

\"meter<\/a><\/p>\n

Not very well, it seems. How about if I carefully process the image, sharpening it up, straightening it, and making it very high-contrast greyscale:<\/p>\n

\"not<\/a><\/p>\n

Hmm, the big figure’s completely wrong, but it got the rest.<\/p>\n

Okay, so let’s feed it a nice canned example, like this one (courtesy of Greeneville Light & Power System<\/a>‘s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How to Read Your Electric Meter<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d page). Even I<\/em> can see that this reads 46372:<\/p>\n

\"glps.net-sm46372\"<\/a>According to Utility Meter Reader, though:<\/p>\n

\"2013-10-21_16.28.15\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The big figure’s off by one again. Very strange, especially since it picked up 4.23 for the first dial. In desperation, I clipped a small part of the GE meter image from my screen, and sent it to the app:<\/p>\n

\"2013-10-21_18.41.11\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2558 is the right answer. Phew! But the app only seemed to work on a well-lit, clean meter fascia with no glass in the way and an image taken by a rather nice DSLR. One out of three ain’t quite good enough.<\/p>\n

One concern I have about the app is that \u00e2\u20ac\u201d while it allows you to e-mail a reading to your utility \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it quietly BCCs a copy of that reading (which includes your meter details) to imeterreader [at] the-next-future.com<\/em>. I didn’t see much of a privacy contract when I downloaded the app onto my Android phone, so I don’t know what they are going to do with my readings or personal data. So if it ever gets to working properly, I won’t use that feature.<\/p>\n

The app’s a good idea, but the implementation’s pretty far off where it needs to be. Of course, one could quickly whip up an implementation in OpenCV<\/a> to identify dial circles and read the pointers. But do all this on your smartphone, however, and you’d fall foul of their US patent application<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Utility Meter Reader is a great idea for an app. Using the camera on your smartphone, snap a picture of your utility meter’s analogue dials, and through the power of some clever image processing, the app will return your meter reading. Traditional meters are a bit hard to read, as the dials rotate in alternate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[1105,2331,1571,1557,2731,2732,2730],"class_list":["post-10043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-analogue","tag-android","tag-dial","tag-meter","tag-opencv","tag-patent","tag-read"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-2BZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10043"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10058,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10043\/revisions\/10058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}