Mechanical meter image recognition is a kind of new technology in meter reading field, it works by installing image acquisition device in front of meter. In order to solve the problem of low efficiency and high consumption of current technologies, we propose TMMSER (template matchingmaximized stable extremal regions) that based on template matching. TMMSER extends MSER(g) algorithm into twodimension algorithm, TMMSER (g, s), which using gray value and special template as parameters. TMMSER is more rapid by excluding the background noise interference.