In the institutions and venues having multiple parking decks, it can sometimes be difficult to locate empty parking spots. Examples include academic institutions, commercial parking decks, etc. A research on the prevalence of smart parking lots indicates a recent focus on the monitoring of electric charging stations within the traditional parking lots, rather than a real time monitoring of all the parking spots inventory.
Our work focuses on designing, developing and prototyping an implementation of a hybrid computer-vision and client-facing app system to eliminate user’s guesswork and to improve efficiency of the parking lot system. In our approach, the real-time video-feed of a parking lot's entrance/exit is processed using a portable, independent, computing system. The processed information is transmitted to a remote server via telemetry using LoRa (Long Range) protocol. LoRa is a low-power wide-area network protocol developed by Semtech Corporation that works independently without any other network (like Wifi, WAN, LAN) dependencies. The server then processes telemetry-data and updates the parking spots inventory in real-time. The client facing app then uses the real-time inventory data to provide current parking lot status to the user. Additional features like notifications about full, closed, busy lots also are also planned to be implemented.
