ABSTRACT
Parking automation has been developed for locating available parking
spaces inside a parking lot with new technologies, such as automatic collection,
capacity, or empty spaces’ detection; to both reduce search time and avoid
crowds of vehicles waiting to park in it. A simple detection system of
available spaces, within the Faculty and Staff parking lot of the Engineering
and Chemistry Departments at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico
(UACH), was set up. First, an analysis of vehicle capacity was carried out to
establish the peak hours of vehicles’ entrances and compare it to the parking lots’ capacity. For one working week (6 days), it was
determined that Tuesdays have the highest vehicle occupancy, and Saturdays are
the days with the least traffic. Second, the geometric design of the parking
lot (divided into two areas because of the terrain topography: upper and bottom levels), its
dimensions and location of parking spots and marks on the pavement for traffic
directions, were obtained from its blueprint, to visualize how the surveillance
cameras can be oriented to cover the area. A detection system prototype was
created for a specific area of the parking lot, using an artificial vision
technique to perform the video extraction, while the digital image processing
was developed in MATLAB. To complement and achieve the objective, Object- Oriented Programming (OOP)
was used to obtain the count analysis as well as the availability/occupancy of
each of the parking areas. This information is shown on a web page, with a simple driver-friendly design,
since it has each parking space number and its availability in blue with the
word “Available” or, in the opposite case, the word “Taken” in pink.
Share and Cite:
Gómez-Ruíz, D. , Espejel-García, D. , Ramírez-Alonso, G. , Espejel-García, V. and Villalobos-Aragón, A. (2021) Implementation of an Available Parking Space Detection System in Hectic Parking Lots.
Journal of Transportation Technologies,
11, 688-701. doi:
10.4236/jtts.2021.114043.