Autonomous Reading of Gauges in Unstructured Environments

This paper introduces GAUREAD, an end-to-end computer vision system that is able to autonomously read analogic gauges with circular shapes and linear scales in unstructured environments. Existing gauge reading software still relies on some manual entry, like the gauge location and the gauge scale, or they are able to work just with a frontal view. On the contrary, GAUREAD comprises all the necessary steps to make the measurement unconstrained from previous information, including gauge detection from scene, perspective rectification and scale reconstruction. Our algorithm achieves a speed of 800 milliseconds per reading on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano 4 GB. Experimental tests show that GAUREAD can provide a measurement with an error within 3% for perspective angles below 20° and within 9% up to 50°. The system is foreseen to be implemented on mobile robotics to automatise not only safety routines, but also critical security operations.