Main menu

The main menu includes sections:

• File

• Sources

• Settings

• Help

Let us consider each section in detail

File

The “File” section consists of the commands “save as…” and “open…”. The first command allows you to save zone settings as a file with the mv extension, the second command allows you to open this file. These commands are also available using the keyboard shortcuts ctrl+s and ctrl+o respectively.

Sources

This section allows you to select a source for the program to process frames/images.

Cameras

Shows all webcams and IP cameras available at the time the program is launched. Links to IP cameras can be specified by the user in the file input/ip_cameras.txt relative to Program Directory (one URL per line). The list of cameras is not updated automatically; to refresh it there is an “Update” command.

Note

If a new webcam was connected while the program was running, it will not appear in the menu until the “Update” command is executed.

The list of IP cameras is displayed regardless of whether they are available or not. If the selected camera turns out to be unavailable, it simply will not work. Make sure you correctly specify the link to the IP camera via the RTSP protocol. The specific link format is set by the IP camera manufacturer. For example, the link may look like this:

rtsp://admin:12345@192.168.200.11:554/Streaming/Channels/101

Streaming from a phone

You can use a smartphone as an IP camera: install an app that streams the phone camera over RTSP (or HTTP, if supported for that source), add the stream URL to input/ip_cameras.txt, then select the camera in Sources → Cameras.

For example, IP Webcam (Android) is suitable. Other similar apps (for Android or iOS) are fine as well — the important part is a stable network video stream and a ready-to-use stream address shown by the app.

Typical steps:

1. Install a video streaming app on the phone (for example, IP Webcam or a similar app).

2. Start the stream and, if needed, set a username, password, and port in the app settings.

3. Make sure the phone and the computer running MeterVision are on the same network (Wi‑Fi/LAN), or otherwise connected so that the computer can reach the phone’s IP address.

4. Copy the RTSP URL from the app (the exact format depends on the app), for example:

   rtsp://user:pass@172.16.0.10:8080/h264_ulaw.sdp

5. Add the URL to input/ip_cameras.txt, use Update in the cameras menu in MeterVision, and select the IP camera.

In the phone app you can usually control the frame (zoom, resolution, flash, and so on), which is convenient when you want to point the smartphone at an instrument without a dedicated IP camera.

Examples

Allows you to load built-in examples for a quick demonstration of the program’s capabilities.

Choose photo

Allows you to load a photo for processing.

Choose video

Allows you to load a video for processing.

Settings

Connect neural network…

To recognize using the “neural network” method, you need to specify the path to the Tesseract-OCR executable file.

• For Windows: this is the tesseract.exe file

• For Linux and macOS: this is the tesseract file

Install the Tesseract-OCR program beforehand.

Note

Tesseract is an open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine, and is the most popular and high-quality OCR library.

OCR uses neural networks to detect and recognize text in images.

Language

You can choose any program interface language from the list provided. After selecting the desired language, you need to restart the program. To do this, click “Yes” in the dialog window that appears after choosing the language. If for some reason the program did not restart, do it manually.

Turn on camera at program startup

This option determines whether the camera will be started automatically and become the “source” when the program starts. Regardless of the selected value, at startup the program always checks all available cameras.

Camera resolution

Select the desired camera resolution.

Note

The ability to select a particular camera resolution depends not on the program, but on the camera itself. Not every resolution can be set for every camera. See the message about whether the desired resolution was set in the Log window.

Recognition results

The “Overlay results on image” command turns on/off the mode for overlaying recognition results on the image.

“Write results to text files” turns on/off the mode of continuously writing results to text files stored in the output folder in Program Directory. A separate file with the zone number as its name is created for each zone, and a results.txt file is also created to which all recognition results are written.

“Send results over socket” turns on/off the socket server. When this mode is enabled, the program waits for connections from external programs (host and port are set in input/socket_config.txt in Program Directory).

Over the socket, an external program can request the current recognition results and send MeterVision control commands. The protocol, command list, and code examples are described in External Programs.

Working directory…

Allows you to select a new program Program Directory. By default it is located in Documents/MeterVision.

Changing the working directory lets you run several instances or versions of the program in parallel: each one has its own directory with settings, logs, license files, and input/output data, so they do not interfere with each other.

After you select a directory:

1. The contents of the current working directory are copied to the selected directory (except the output folder: only empty output/screenshots and output/figures folders are created in the new directory).

2. The program switches to the new directory: results, logs, settings, license files, and files from the input folder are written there.

3. The selected path is saved in Documents/MeterVision/settings/work_dir.txt and used on subsequent launches.

Note

You cannot select a directory inside the current working directory — this would cause a copy error. The “Restore default settings” command does not reset the selected working directory. The file with the working directory path is always stored in the default directory, even when the program uses another location.

Save settings

This command saves the current settings from the main menu for subsequent program launches.

Restore default settings

This command restores the default settings from the main menu.

Help

Allows you to check the program version and open the documentation.