Parking lot occupancy determination from lamp-post camera images

Abstract

In recent years, detection of parking space availability has become of great importance worldwide due to its high correlation with fuel consumption and traffic congestion. We propose a novel framework for the automatic detection of vacant parking spaces from a lamp-post camera view of a parking lot. Our method models the 3-D volume parking spaces based on the parking lot geometry. The occupancy of the parking lot is determined based on a vehicle detector and the inferred volume of each space. We evaluate our method on three different datasets and show that its accuracy is close to 80% on a wide variety of test images.