Parking lot occupancy determination from lamp-post camera images

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.