A YOLOv3-Based Industrial Instrument Classification and Reading Recognition Method

Aiming at the demand of industrial instrument reading, this study proposes a method of industrial instrument classification and reading recognition based on YOLOv3. Given that industrial meters can be divided into pointer meters and digital meters according to the dial type, this method conducts a reading study for each of the two types of meters. Firstly, the YOLOv3 model is trained to recognize and detect the meter types and classify the meters according to the values of the obtained classes. The pointer meter uses a Hough circle to detect the dial, extracts the scale and the pointer, calculates the angle between the 0 scale line and the pointer, and obtains the reading of the pointer meter. The digital meter extracts the digits by finding the contours of the dial and the digit area and then uses a support vector machine (SVM) to identify the extracted digits and output the readings of the digital meter. Through the test, the mean average precision (mAP) of the recognition model in this study is 93.73%. The absolute error of pointer meter reading is less than 0.1 in general, and the maximum relative error is 0.35%. The accuracy of the digital meter reading is 99.7%. The proposed method can accurately read the value of the instrument and meet the needs of industrial production.

Automated summary

This study proposes a method based on YOLOv3 for industrial instrument classification and reading recognition. By training the model to recognize and classify different types of instruments, the method achieves accurate readings for pointer and digital meters. The method shows high performance in terms of recognition accuracy and reading precision, as demonstrated by the test results.