Efficient Vision-based Smart Meter Reading Network

For building the big data collection infrastructure, a vision-based smart meter-reading network and its gateway is provided for a community gas supply system that uses traditional mechanical meters. In the network architecture, the gas meter readings are captured by embedded image sensor nodes and then transmitted to a newly designed gateway for image recognition and are collected in the embedded database of gateway. The Web-based monitoring system designed using HTML5 is applicable to a mobile device which allows a user to monitor household gas consumption and history and allows a gas company to develop an effective energy management system to analyze community users' energy consumption models using the big data collected in the database.