Vacant parking space detector for outdoor parking lot by using surveillance camera and FCM classifier

Abstract

The most prevailing approach now for parking lot vacancy detecting system is to use sensor-based techniques. The main impediments to the camera-based system in applying to parking lots on rooftop and outside building are the glaring sun light and dark shadows in the daytime, and low-light intensity and back-lighting in the nighttime. To date, no camera-based detecting systems for outdoor parking lots have been in practical use. A few engineering firms provide the camera-based system, which is only for underground and indoor parking lots. This paper reports on the new camera based system called ParkLotD for detecting vacancy/occupancy in parking lots. ParkLotD uses a classifier based on fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and hyper-parameter tuning by particle swarm optimization (PSO). The test result of the detection error rate for the indoor multi-story parking lot has improved by an order of magnitude compared to the current system based on the edge detection approach. ParkLotD demonstrates high detection performance and enables the camera-based system to achieve the practical use in outdoor parking lots.