TITLE:
Recognition of Pointer Meter Readings Based on YOLOv8 and DeepLabv3+
AUTHORS:
Jingwei Li, Md. Al Amin, Zhiyu Shao
KEYWORDS:
Nuclear Power, Pointer Instrument, YOLOv8, DeepLabv3+, Reading Recognition
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Computer and Communications,
Vol.13 No.1,
January
20,
2025
ABSTRACT: Pointer instruments are widely used in the nuclear power industry. Addressing the issues of low accuracy and slow detection speed in recognizing pointer meter readings under varying types and distances, this paper proposes a recognition method based on YOLOv8 and DeepLabv3+. To improve the image input quality of the DeepLabv3+ model, the YOLOv8 detector is used to quickly locate the instrument region and crop it as the input image for recognition. To enhance the accuracy and speed of pointer recognition, the backbone network of DeepLabv3+ was replaced with Mo-bileNetv3, and the ECA+ module was designed to replace its SE module, reducing model parameters while improving recognition precision. The decoder’s fourfold-up sampling was replaced with two twofold-up samplings, and shallow feature maps were fused with encoder features of the corresponding size. The CBAM module was introduced to improve the segmentation accuracy of the pointer. Experiments were conducted using a self-made dataset of pointer-style instruments from nuclear power plants. Results showed that this method achieved a recognition accuracy of 94.5% at a precision level of 2.5, with an average error of 1.522% and an average total processing time of 0.56 seconds, demonstrating strong performance.