Random Forest Implementation in Prepaid Electric Meter Recognition

While prepaid electricity services provide better flexibility, it comes with an additional step for the customer. Instead of paying a monthly bill based on electric usage, a prepaid system requires customers to actively predict their electricity usage before they pay for the correct electricity value. This presents a challenge because Underestimating electricity usage may lead to a power outage. Therefore, a system that monitors electricity can be developed to address this issue. There are two approaches to developing an electric monitoring system: designing the electric meter equipped with monitoring features or designing an external capturing device to work with the current electric meter. The first approach is costly and requires a meter disassembly. Thus, in this paper, the second approach is used. By utilizing image processing and a Random Forest machine learning algorithm, a monitoring device can be developed to read the digital meter's display. Although it may affect performance due to the low-power device, Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Camera are used to provide automation. This method yields an accuracy of 97% using 375 images.