Automatic Reading System for Analog Instruments Based on Computer Vision and Inspection Robot for Power Plant

In this paper, an automatic reading system for analog instruments has been designed for monitoring in power plants. In a general automatic reading system, there are many limitations to the reading correctness and system robustness such as the high cost for the reason that there is only one instrument could be monitored by a single system, the strict restrict of the camera angle, and being not suitable for instruments with dense scales and so on. We present some solutions to overcome these limitations. Firstly, we combine a mobile inspection robot with an image capture device and the image processing method to cut the cost of the monitoring of analog instruments in power plants. Then, we use Hough transform and perspective transform to correct the geometric distortion of images caused by camera angle. Eventually, we get the result of dense scaled instruments based on polar transform. Experiments show that our system performs quite well, and the reading error is less than the results which obtained from the general automatic reading system.