Implementation of an Available Parking Space Detection System in Hectic Parking Lots

Parking automation has been developed for locating available parking spaces inside a parking lot with new technologies, such as automatic collection, capacity, or empty spaces’ detection;to both reduce search time and avoid crowds of vehicles waiting to park in it. A simple detection system of available spaces, within the Faculty and Staff parking lot of the Engineering and Chemistry Departments at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico (UACH), was set up. First, an analysis of vehicle capacity was carried out to establish the peak hours of vehicles’ entrances and compare it to the parking lots’ capacity. For one working week (6 days), it was determined that Tuesdays have the highest vehicle occupancy, and Saturdays are the days with the least traffic. Second, the geometric design of the parking lot (divided into two areas because of the terrain topography: upper and bottom levels), its dimensions and location of parking spots and marks on the pavement for traffic directions, were obtained from its blueprint, to visualize how the surveillance cameras can be oriented to cover the area. A detection system prototype was created for a specific area of the parking lot, using an artificial vision technique to perform the video extraction, while the digital image processing was developed in MATLAB. To complement and achieve the objective, Object- Oriented Programming (OOP) was used to obtain the count analysis as well as the availability/occupancy of each of the parking areas. This information is shown on a web page, with a simple driver-friendly design, since it has each parking space number and its availability in blue with the word “Available” or, in the opposite case, the word “Taken” in pink.