Rotating Dial Number recognition Approach

edit

Hello openCV community :)

I am new to image processing & openCV. I am trying to isolate and regonize the numbers in rotating dial of a water meter using openCV. So far i am at the very beginning of the process. Below is the image of a sample water meter i am testing out.

For isolating the number dial i have tried the following:

• Used ORB feature detector to detect the location of the dial. ORB detects the dial when i use the a similar image of a dial with numbers but it wont work for all numbers

Other alternatives that i am going to try will involve,

• Estimating the dials location by the Red color ( I am unsure about a method that will let me extract the whole dial using this technique)
• Look into if I can use something like a neural network to recognize the dial
• Look into if I can use the feature of white and red on the dial to detect and extract the dial. (Would that be possible?)

What would be the most effective method for this? What kind of pre-processing should i do for the image?

Thank you in advance :)