The Design And Development Of Camera-Style Remote Water Meter Management System

The existing ordinary water meters have been sold for many years in our country, and the market is relatively large. To achieve the demand of information management, the meter should have remote-transmitting data function. If the current ordinary meter is changed into remote meter, the cost will be higher, so it is more diffcult to enter the meter market. Aiming at the transformation of the existing meter, this paper designs and develops a camera-style remote water meter management system. The main idea is that installing the camera above the meter and transmitting meter image data by wireless network. The cost will be reduced and the normal water billing can also be ensured. This study will improve the work efficiency of water companies and has broad application prospects.The camera-style remote water meter management system is developed on the basis of C/S model. Meter data collection terminal consists of camera and water meter. The concentrator controls the camera through RS485 bus and gets the image data regularly. And the GPRS module of concentrator uploads the reveived image data to server through the Internet. The server parses and recognizes the image data and save the current read to database. The operators visit the server by the HMI client to accomplish functional user requirements, such as water charges, statistics management and so on. The server will respond the request and reply to the client. The main contents of this paper include:1. The research of water meter digital image recognition algorithm.There is various noise during the process of collecting actual meter images. The images should be improved by pretreatment first, including transforming the colorful images into gray images, image enhancement and noise removing. The images are binarized to separate the target and background. After binarization, connected and small region removing method is adopted to clear the noise. The paper determines the target digital region of meter image through region positioning method and uses rotating projection method to correct the skew images. Single character images are got by digital segment method.An effective two-times recognition algorithm of meter digital image is proposed on the basis of template matching to complete the recognition of whole and half word.At last, a highly adaptive recognition of touching character is also implemented.2. The design and development of meter management system server software.This section analyzes the principle of server and designs the overall structure of server based on SRP. The server mainly includes database, communication module and database dealing module. Based on the user demand, the database builds related entity tables, views and stored procedures, besides, designs the strategies of performance optimization, backup and recovery. The communication module gives the user-defined communication protocol and implements big concurrent data’s receiving and dispatching and data dealing with many clients by using multi-thread technology. Ddatabase dealing module uses ADO.NET to visit the database and implements different application functions according to the flags. In addition, this section also introduces the interface design of server.3. The design and development of meter management system client software.The client is divided into data communication layer, data dealing layer and interface layer in the view of hierarchy. Data communication layer implements asynchronous non-blocking network data communication by using Socket which is based on TCP/IP communication protocol and implements underlying communication by using multi-thread technology. Data dealing layer is the logical implementation part of client application functions and focuses on the functions and implement methods of user management module. This section also introduces the interface design of every functional module.In order to verify whether the camera-style remote water meter management system meet every design requirement, the paper makes communication testing, water meter image recognition testing, function testing and fault tolerance testing on the system respectively. The testing result indicates that the system is stable and reliable, meeting the predetermined requirements.