Parking Availability Using Image Processing

Parking in major cities is a big problem with the exponential growth of car owners and limited space availability. Finding parking space in parking lots in and around places of high activity like downtown or stadiums during games is a big problem. A lot of time and effort is wasted by drivers in actually navigating the whole parking lot looking for space. This problem can be solved by using image processing techniques.

PROPOSED ACTIVITY

We propose setting up a parking availability determination system based on image processing. The system will consist of a camera network in a parking lot which provides live image feeds to a hub. The parking lot will be mapped and the occupancy of parking spaces will be determined. The entrance of the parking lot will have a display which would show the driver a map of empty spaces. This saves the driver the trouble of actually searching for empty spaces by driving through the parking lot. The parking lot availability can also be displayed on cell phones using an application so real time occupancy can be determined. We propose parallel image processing of images of parking lots obtained by two or more cameras on a single hub thus making it cost effective.

EMPTY SPACE DETECTION

The whole parking lot is mapped with specific block of pixels in the input image assigned a parking spot. When a parking spot is occupied by a car its presence can be detected by applying image segmentation algorithm and it can be further verified by taking the color and intensity differential for edge extraction and recognition of vehicle occupancy. Now cars being driven on the aisle could be either be one needing a parking spot or one on its way out. The obvious problem in such a system would be reserving spots for vehicles being driven on the aisle so that the correct availability is determined. This problem can be solved by tracking the cars entering the parking lot and tagging them. Tracking these cars would be a trivial problem since these cars move linearly and with a slow constant velocity. For the cars that have been tagged the nearest parking spot in its path will be reserved.