Smart urban parking detection system

Abstract

Nowadays in an urban area, looking for available parking spots, is not only a waste of time and energy but also it causes more traffic and air pollution. Therefore finding available parking spots is becoming more challenging on daily life. This paper proposes a novel solution by providing motorists with real-time information about the availability of spots in parking spaces through a smartphone application. Ultrasonic sensors and raspberry pi were used at the gates of parking zones to detect cars and calculate the number of available parking spots. Client web server was used to accommodate multiple users in an android platform. Drivers can see available parking spots in real time on a map, they also can get navigate to nearest available parking spots using the mobile application. The parking system is designed for different types of parking zone (such as open space car parking and multilevel car parking); the cost of deploying the system is inexpensive due to the low demand for Raspberry pi single board computer as a local server and ultrasonic sensors for each entrance and exit gates compared to those that require a sensor for each parking spot.