Automated vehicle parking slot recognition and monitoring using Optimised image processing techniques

Abstract

Due to the increase in individual vehicle usage, detecting an unoccupied parking slot and collecting payment for parking in an ample parking space have become monotonous tasks in the modern era. Traditional and manual parking slot management in large parking slots was inefficient and required a number of human resources. To address these issues, an automated, intelligent, and efficient parking system is required. This work presents an automated parking slot identification and monitoring technique that can be used to search for unoccupied parking spaces, a guide to parking spaces, negotiate parking fees, and track vehicles using number plate recognition. The proposed method employs optimized image processing and optical character recognition techniques to implement the system. When a vehicle approaches the parking entrance, cameras automatically capture its image and number plate information (registration number) and process it to direct the driver to an unoccupied parking slot. The system counts the number of parked vehicles and displays the current parking status. The system can also be used to collect electronic parking fees based on number plate information and parking duration. The presented method in this paper was tested in a modelled environment and yielded more acceptable performance (accuracy 94.28%) with very little use of hardware resources to keep the system cost as low as possible