Research on improved YOLOV7-SSWD digital meter reading recognition algorithms

Meter reading recognition is an important link for robots to complete inspection tasks. To solve the problems of low detection accuracy and inaccurate localization of current meter reading recognition algorithms, the YOLOV7-SSWD (YOLOV7-SiLU-SimAM-Wise-IoU-DyHeads) model is proposed, a novel detection model based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which is improved on the YOLOV7-Tiny model. First, the Wise-IoU loss function is used to solve the problem of sample quality imbalance and improve the model's detection accuracy. Second, a new convolutional block is constructed using the SiLU activation function and applied to the YOLOV7-Tiny model to enhance the model's generalization ability. The dynamic detection header is then built as the header of YOLOV7-Tiny, which realizes the fusion of multi-scale feature information and improves the target recognition performance. Finally, we introduce SimAM to improve the feature extraction capability of the network. In this paper, the importance of each component is fully verified by ablation experiments and comparative analysis. The experiments showed that the mAP and F1-scores of the YOLOV7-SSWD model reached 89.8% and 0.84. Compared with the original network, the mAP increased by 8.1% and the F1-scores increased by 0.1. The YOLOV7-SSWD algorithm has better localization and recognition accuracy and provides a reference for deploying inspection robots to perform automatic inspections.