Car-Park Occupancy Information System

Abstract- Drivers always face difficulty of finding available parking lot while entering into a huge parking area. A Car-Park Occupancy Information System (COINS) is perhaps a viable solution to reduce the amount of time needed to search for a vacant car-park lot especially in a huge parking area. With this system, images captured by a surveillance camera were processed in real-time to identify the occupancies of the parking lots. This occupancy information is further processed by a central control unit and distributed to display panels located at strategic locations at the parking area. The drivers can easily find a vacant parking lot based on the information displayed on the panels. Motivation for developing this system came from the fact that minimum cost is involved because image processing technique is used rather than sensor-based techniques. As surveillance cameras are readily available in most car parks, this technique is much cost effective than installing sensor on each parking lot. The concept of this system and its initial works with positive experiment results are presented in this paper