Automatic Electricity Billing

Abstract: Every system around us is becoming automatic and making our lives more comfortable. Our idea is to develop an automatic electricity billing which is very essential in our daily life. At present, an employee from the electricity board visits regularly once in a month, takes the meter reading and submits these readings to the office. The office generates a bill on the basis of meter reading. The accuracy of this method is less due to human interventions. As a result, Automatic Electricity Bill concept is developed in which the collection of meter reading, processing of the reading and sending the bill to customer is done automatically. This method employs a camera which is fixed in front of the meter is used to take the snapshot. The captured image is then processed and the meter reading is extracted. The bill amount is calculated and is send to customer as SMS via GSM module. A copy of SMS is sent to the electricity board for documentation purpose.

Keywords: Character recognition, GSM, Image processing, MATLAB.