Automating flowmeter calibration process: Digital measurements from numerical displays using open-source optical character recognition tools

This paper presents a methodology for obtaining digital machine-readable measurements from numerical displays images. The proposed method provides means to digitalize an automate a previously manual and labour-intensive laboratory procedure for flowmeters calibration. The proposed method allows to obtain machine-readable readings from remote numerical displays with available-off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. By using smartphones for remote image capture and streaming and the Tesseract open-source OCR engine, is possible to leverage the infrastructure’s digital transition, improve procedures efficiency and effectiveness while promoting sustainable actions with cost reductions.