A Vision-Based Parking Lot Management System

Goals of parking lot management system include counting the number of parked vehicles, monitoring the changes of the parked vehicles over the time, and identifying the stalls available. To decrease the cost of the production, an integrated vision-based system is a good choice. In this paper, we propose a vision-based parking management system to manage an outdoor parking lot by four cameras set up at loft of buildings around it, sending information, including real-time display, to database of ITS center via internet. This system enables drivers to find parking spaces available or monitoring the parking lot where they parked their cars easily by wireless communication device. To increase accuracy, in the beginning, color manage is done to all input images, maintaining color consistency. Then, an adaptive parking lot background model is generated. The adequate color of each parking space is found out using statistical method in color image sequences captured by a camera, and foreground is extracted based on color information. The result will be further modified by shadow detection based on luminance analysis. Vision-based parking management system can manage large area by just several cameras. Adjusting position of the camera can easily make this system suitable for most cases. Besides, this system is endurable and is easy-installed because of its simple equipment.