Smart Auto Parking System By: Shenzhen TGW Technology Co., Ltd Thanks to the application of intelligent parking management system, the urban traffic congestion index is gradually decreasing. "Internet + traffic" mode is developing rapidly from first-tier to fifth-tier cities across the country, and the government is actively promoting the development of smart traffic. But many cities are still suffering from traffic jam and the lack of parking spaces. We should adopt more intelligent management methods to improve the low traffic efficiency caused by traditional parking lots, such as the low efficiency cause by sending CARDS at the entrance and charging at the exit manually. Intelligent parking benefit from the technology of automatic recognition and payment without manual intervention, which can help to realize intelligent access management of parking lot and improve the traffic efficiency. Adopting independent operation mode, the administrators of traditional parking lots can not share data to each other, so they are unable to integrate urban parking space resources to realize intelligent query, booking, etc. To deal with this problem, we need to offer each parking lot access to a unified smart parking platform to integrate parking resource, realize data sharing and improve berth resource utilization. The unified platform also provide important data for urban parking planning and decision-making. Because of the lack of parking guidance, car owners often need to drive a long road to find an available parking space. On the one hand, the owners can’t get a good parking experience, on the other hand, it also causes traffic jam during looking for a parking lot. Aiming at such a demand, intelligent parking guidance system provide parking guidance information by screen, mobile phone APP. So car owners can get free parking garages and parking guidance information and experience a perfect parking service. Intelligent traffic adopts intelligent parking management system, which is to collect parking data in real time, including the functions of inquiring available parking spaces and helping navigation to the location of available parking spaces, effectively reduce the operating cost of parking lots and reduce traffic congestion. We are a License plate recognition company which specialize in ALPR system, (License plate recognition), we offer ALPR solution all around the world. Click the links below to learn more about our products! ALPR software, ALPR camera, ALPR hardware, license plate recognition system, LPR camera You can also learn more about ALPR at Wikipedia

Last September, we installed optical parking sensors to measure the occupancy of more than 500 street parking spots in the city of Braunschweigs university district. Thats the largest installation of parking sensors ever to be rolled out in public space in Germany and one thing is for sure:We will make it the last one.This is the story of the great efforts, an AI company made in search for ground truth data to fuel its algorithms.

This is also the story behind a beautiful piece of engineering, which happened to be the by-product of a greater mission and will eventually never be put to production again. All of that in favor of a more disruptive, data-driven technology.Since, at Bliq, we work on predictive algorithms to model parking availability based on traffic data, we have the natural need for ground truth data of the real-life parking occupancy in a reference area. To obtain that kind of data, we decided to build our very own, real-world experimental setup of parking sensors that measure the occupancy of more than 500 street parking spots, in real-time, 24 hours a day.With this article, we would like to share some insights about the engineering efforts that have gone into this project. More specifically, well talk about the test site we chose, system architecture and the actual sensor we designed and built to collect data. The test siteSometimes, AI companies need to become creative when it comes to collecting ground truth for their models. In our case, modeling car parking availability, this meant finding a district that meets certain criteria in terms of traffic flow, usage and demographics.We chose the university district in Braunschweig for its great variety of influences on comparably small space:In the south, we have the universitys main campus attracting thousands of students and hundreds of employees every day. Even further to the south, the inner city center with its shops and attractions is just a few-minutes walk (not shown on the map above). The northern part of the district forms a residential area with public, non-restriced street parking. Most people living in this area are either students or employed by the local automotive industry.

The vast majority of residents commutes to work using private cars. The district is separated by an arterial circular road, which embraces the citys center district.How the system worksThe basic system architecture of the sensor installation is pretty straightforward and basically what one would expect from most IoT applications: A little piece of hardware is deployed somewhere in the real world and transmits data to a cloud backend. The backend stores the data and makes it accessible for further processing, to serve as ground truth for machine learning endeavours or just for simple visualization in an app or web app.Hard requirement: Privacy by designWhats special about the sensors architecture is the fairly strong computational power we deployed on the edge: Because of regulatory requirements in German Public Space that is additionally fired by recent and ongoing GDPR discussions, we were not able to process images on a remote cloud with lots of computational resources.Thats why we needed to do all the heavy lifting for determining open spots directly on the sensor device rather than somewhere else. The upside about this is that this approach does not consume large data volumes for sending images back and forth. Instead, we can keep the running costs of the sensors for connectivity also within a relatively low range. On the downside, equipping the device with enough computational power to perform image analysis requires lots of extra efforts in hardware development. Why not use another parking sensor?Why have we decided to go through the pain of designing and building our own parking sensor instead of just buying one of the many finished sensor models that are already available out there?There are three answers to that:We didnt know how complex building a new device was gonna become ;)The existing parking sensors all had some flaws: The regulatory situation prohibited us from using any kind of available, optical solution, since these kind of systems would violate privacy. Surface-mounted sensors would not withstand snow removal during winter. And lastly, in-ground sensors were quite costly themselves and even more expensive to install. We were on a quite tight budget when we started this project. We entirely bootstrapped the company at this point: Our funds consisted of some government funding, first revenues and some prices we won here and there. The other sensor models with a price tag of something in between 75 and 250 EUR per spot were just simply to expensive for us at this time. The new optical parking sensorThe idea for the working principle of our sensor was simple: Deploy the same algorithm we had already developed in our previous research project on down-sized hardware, connect it to the internet, put everything in a waterproof box and mount it to a light pole.The algorithm itself is basically an image classifier, which requires pre-defined regions of interest to look at. The original purpose of the model was to automate the analysis of parking occupancy in some huge image series we collected in a previous project with offline cameras. The challenge now only was to design a suitable hardware rig with enough computational power, shrink the model so it executes on this setup and ensure continous power supply.This was our specs wishlist:Low cost per spot: Standard componentsMeasurement frequency up to 3 min down to 30 sec.Detection robust against weather, changes in lighting and inaccurately parking cars (e. g. one car occupying two spots)Monitoring health state of deviceOption for remote software updatesLow energy consumption25 years useful lifespanSoftwareThe sensor software consists of three layers: The operating system, which was a custom development for this project, the core routine controlling all the sensors function and the actual machine learning model for open spot detection.Operating systemFor running a full fledged vision model on the edge, we quickly figured that we would need a way bigger software setup than in other IoT hardware projects. The decision was made to build a custom distribution of Linux using Yocto. This way, we could have full control over everything the OS is doing. The core features were two separate partitions, in order to be able to do file system updates and swap partitions, a number of libraries, required by the core routine and a watchdog reset. The hardware watchdog of our SBC reboots the device in case anything does not operate as expected. Having smart bricks meters above the ground on light poles because of a bug in the software would literally be the worst case.Core routineThe core routine is responsible for running the detector in an adjustable time interval, monitoring the sensors state of health and communicating with the backend (retrieving config data and sending updates).The core routine is implemented in Python. This gave us great flexibility and simplified image processing a lot, since we could make use of the large existing Python code base we already had in the company.One great thing about the software design is its ability for independent remote updates of each individual component: From the detection model over source code for the core routine up to the kernel or even the entire file system each part can be replaced remotely. Facing rapid evolvements in the CV and machine learning field in general, we wanted to make sure that the code thats running the sensors will be state of the art over the entire lifespan. Machine LearningTo perform the detection task, we took a version of tensorflow and after some tweaking eventually got it to work on our setup. Once this was done, we could deploy pretty much any pre-trained tensorflow that would fit into GPU memory.We decided to use the MobileNet, since it showed the best ratio between accuracy and performance on our setup. We also looked at several other approaches based on traditional computer vision features such as HOG features, histograms, etc. in combination with conventional machine learning classifiers like SVMs. Although these tests resulted in quite high computational performance due to much simpler model design compared to MobileNet, model accuracy was lower, which may be explained by the usual downsides of standard CV feature descriptions (light invariance, scale invariance). HardwareWorking with hardware was a quite new experience for us, being a pure software company up to this point. Although Mathias, our CTO, had worked on designing electronics at his previous job with Volkswagen R&D, our company wasnt quite ready for a hardware development task and honestly looking back, it still isnt today.Nonetheless, we needed a functional design which was easy to manufacture and to iterate with the resources we had as a bootstrapped company at this time. So, our requirements list quickly turned out to be looking like this:Case needs to be waterproof and 3d-printableSensor should be able to run at least 12 hours on batteryThe camera should be protected from rain and spray water and work in darkness as wellThe design needs to hold the camera, a temperature / humidity sensor, the LTE module, the single board computer and some power electronics for converting voltage to the appropriate level.A battery is needed to continue operating when the light pole has its power switched off (during the day)The entire setup needs to be modular to facilitate installation and to be able to exchange single components in case of failure. It also needs to small and painted gray to look unobtrusive in its operating environmentOperating conditions from -20 C to 70 C (since the setup can become quite warm in summer when it is fully exposed to the sun)We started off with a design including infrared LEDs (like many outdoor cameras have them) to be able to operate in night conditions. However, this design choice turned out to come with some flaws: These LEDs were quite power-consuming (compared to the rest of the electronics), making a non-standard and thus power supply necessary. Despite the large power consumption, they werent really capable of illuminating the entire field of sight. We probably would have needed an external IR floodlight, which, again, wasnt a serious alternative. And lastly, the LED-spiced design wasnt very pretty either.To overcome the problem of night operations we decided to make use of the static camera setting: Since the cameras position is static and the objects we are trying to detect are normally also still, we can increase exposure and the sensors light sensitivity in order to work only with residual light. So we overwrote the cameras internal exposure and ISO control and wrote a simple feedback loop that adjusts lighting settings based on the luminance of last captured frame. This approach turned out to perform quite well, since in most streets there is enough residual light from the streetlights.After several more iterations, we finally ended up with the design as shown above: The camera sits inside a cone to be protected from spray water and sun reflexes as much as possible. The electronics are mounted onto a socket inside and a ribbon cable connects the camera to the main board. The bottom is removable and mounted to the case with four standard screws. Since the case is printed in ABS, quadratic nuts sit in cut-outs to make sure that the screws can be properly tightened. A GoPro-like joint connects the case to the mount, which gets attached to the light pole by using standard steel tape. All parts are optimized for 3d-prinability, which mean no heavy overhangs, import surfaces parallel for high surface quality.Lastly, the battery box is separated from the sensor for better serviceability. It is a standard injection-molded ABS box and contains a 4. 5 Ah 12V lead battery and a charging unit, which takes 230V input (which is the voltage of most street lights in Germany).Whats nextThe data, which we are collecting throughout this project is greatly helping us to improve our understanding (and also our algorithms) of how parking works in different traffic situations and various contexts of factors that influence parking availability.We are going to post more about the actual results from a data science perspective very shortly. We will also spend some time and go more into the details of the software part and are eventually even going to open-source the software, as well as the hardware designs.AcknowledgementsAt this point, we would like to express our gratitude to the city of Braunschweig for giving us access to traffic infrastructure to support this project. They not only provided all the necessary permissions, but also covered parts of the costs. We also would like to send a big thank you to the local traffic operator Bellis and the energy provider BS Energy for the support regarding the installation and power supply of the sensors.About the authorJulian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bliq, a Berlin-based tech company. Bliq provides live parking maps for developers in mobility. RELATED QUESTION I didn't get Google Glass Explorer Edition. Is trying to learn Glass dev without the hardware a futile effort? No, you can still learn the fundamentals of Glass development without the hardware. There are three main approaches for accomplishing this: 1) Visit the Mirror API documentation, get into the playground, and start hashing up some code. Download the PHP, Java, and Python library, whichever you're most comfortable with. Familiarize yourself with the jargon and converntions (timeline, bundles, menus, etc). Read the support documentation (second link below) to see how the Glass hardware actually functions. Build some apps to this specification. Soon enough, you will find a friend with hardware to t

In order to alleviate the congestion of the connecting sections of urban trunk roads and urban roads and eliminate the difficulty of entering and leaving the parking lot as soon as possible, the installation of license plate recognition system in the parking lot can change the traditional access management mode, eliminate the time for vehicles to swipe their cards in and out of the parking lot and speed up the traffic speed of vehicles. With the development of technology, we should break the traditional management mode, timely adopt advanced technology and equipment, promote the development of the original manual charging management of the parking lot to the intelligent direction, strengthen the management of the parking lot, and solve the problem of parking difficulty by changing the management mode of the parking lot. At present, the parking problem has seriously affected people's life and greatly hindered people's driving. Therefore, intelligent traffic management will be the general direction of traffic development in the future. License plate recognition parking lot system has been greatly developed in the parking lot. Compared with the all-in-one card system, license plate recognition has obvious advantages, which makes it easier for vehicles to enter and leave the parking lot. Firstly, compared with the all-in-one card, the license plate recognition parking lot system eliminates the work of card management; First, the card cost of the all-in-one card system is too high, which requires a lot of personnel to manage. Second, cards are easy to lose. For property managers, they need to register, cancel and change cards constantly, which not only wastes time, but also wastes capital cost. Secondly, the license plate recognition parking lot system can work normally in case of power failure, while the all-in-one card can not manage the vehicle in case of power failure. Finally, one of the most obvious advantages of the license plate recognition parking lot system is that it can enable the owner to enter the parking lot directly without parking and swiping his card. When leaving the parking lot, he can judge whether to release or not by comparing with the incoming vehicle information. In view of these special functions of license plate recognition parking lot system, it has been widely used in parking lot in recent years. With the increasing maturity of license plate recognition parking lot system technology, continuous upgrading of technology, continuous optimization of products and continuous improvement of recognition rate, at the same time, it can enable car owners to directly enter the parking lot without parking card swiping time, which effectively alleviates the difficulty of entering and leaving the parking lot, and will certainly become the development trend of the parking lot in the future.

In order to better solve the problem of intelligent transportation, intelligent transportation systems have been employed at some major intersections all over the country, and parking lot management equipment is becoming closer and closer to the needs of modern people. In the license plate recognition system, the recognition rate in rows and columns is not 100%. The general license plate recognition technology can only reach about 98%. Because in the application of license plate recognition, there are still some difficulties, such as some too dirty, damaged and distorted license plates, which will cause the difficulty of license plate location and character segmentation. In addition, due to the large number of provinces in China, there are many Chinese characters with similar shapes. In addition, due to the restriction of resolution, the amount of information of each character is very small, which will also cause the difficulty of character recognition. Of course, if there are some natural factors such as uneven license plate illumination, license plate reflection and license plate backlight, license plate recognition will be more difficult.

License plate recognition is applied in electronic police system, such as red light running monitoring system, overspeed monitoring system, retrograde monitoring system, no traffic monitoring system, emergency parking lane driving monitoring system, mobile vehicle inspection system, etc. The process of license plate recognition can be divided into four steps: license plate location, license plate preprocessing, character segmentation and character recognition principle. The license plate recognition system adopts advanced fuzzy image processing technology, which can well realize the automatic processing of the overall tilt, text tilt, stain and blur of the license plate, and recognize the license plate number that is difficult to be distinguished by human eyes. In recent years, license plate recognition technology has been applied in parking lot management, and has achieved very obvious and effective results, which is widely favored by the license plate recognition industry. License plate recognition technology can play a great role in the parking lot and greatly promote the income of the parking lot. Especially for some uncertain users, they can flexibly use the parking space at any time and increase the flow of parking.The license plate recognition system of tigerwong parking lot is a system based on the combination of video surveillance and cloud platform, which also allows end users to view information. License plate recognition system not only brings convenience to intelligent traffic management, but also its characteristics of energy conservation and environmental protection. No paper tickets, no cards, simply using license plate recognition, labor and equipment costs are greatly reduced. The ticket free parking system provides a complete and friendly user experience, completely discards the parking ticket, and effectively avoids the possibility of traffic congestion at the entrance and exit. The solution of this business model is provided by the company to large and medium-sized parking places free of charge.Compared with the traditional parking lot system, it has changed the old appearance and appeared a new intelligent system. Tigerwong pointed out that the parking lot is a huge market for license plate number recognition, especially the increase in the number of vehicles and the continuous construction of buildings in recent years. Effectively integrate the license plate recognition system to ensure zero missing vehicles. Automatic license plate recognition is the most valuable market in the future parking market. With the integration of HD and intelligence, license plate recognition can also help us solve more problems in life. Intelligent transportation will play an increasingly irreplaceable role in future life.For more exciting industry news and parking plans, please call or follow tigerwong's official website. There will be many unexpected gains if you continue to pay attention!!!.

It is used to display the idle status of this group of parking spaces in the parking lot system. Only when the group of parking spaces are full of vehicles, each group of parking spaces shall be equipped with a parking space indicator. The parking space indicator will be displayed in red. Brewing from the end of last century, the emergence of intelligent parking industry of Huicong intelligent community Netcom is inseparable from the process of rural development in China. From the beginning of this century to the increasing popularity of today, it took only a few decades for science and technology to push through the old and bring forth the new, quietly changing people's lives from time to time.

A variety of existing parking technologies carry out professional intelligent work around vehicle parking, and parking space guidance has become one of the important technologies of intelligent parking. With the development of rural intelligent parking technology, the advantages of three-dimensional garage are prominent, and the development is particularly eye-catching. An indication system that enables the vehicle to enter the destination parking space smoothly. It is generally used in parking lots. The parking space guidance system is mainly used to guide vehicles that need to park.It is convenient for parking, makes the parking lot management standardized and orderly, and is a powerful supplement to the intelligent parking lot system. Its working principle is as follows: firstly, an ultrasonic detector is installed on each parking space, and then the ultrasonic detection technology is used to detect the parking space. It can detect whether the parking space is idle, send the data to the disposal center, output through the disposal center, and feed back the information to each indication display. The parking space guidance system consists of three parts, as follows. the data acquisition system connects the probe to the probe controller through RS485 bus, and the parking space guidance system installs an ultrasonic probe directly above each parking space. The probe controller summarizes and disposes the collected information, and then connects it to the acquisition terminal through an RS485 bus.The acquisition terminal transmits each parking space information to the data processing center through the CAN bus. The data center transmits the data to the management computer in real time, and the computer analyzes and disposes of the data. Here, the data center can also transmit the data to the acquisition terminal, which can send the information to the empty parking space display screen for parking guidance. the central processing system and transmits it to the corresponding display equipment. The central processing is mainly to analyze the collected data. It mainly includes the following aspects; Use the management computer to release relevant data to the LAN; Data can be transmitted to the control center of rural parking guidance system through GSM wireless modem.Publish the parking space data in the parking lot. the output display system constitutes the transmission display system. The information collected by the central processing system is analyzed and processed. What I rarely see in this part is the display screen and guide license plate. Send it to each display screen to display parking space information for parking guidance. Current situation: the development of rural parking guidance system, Europe, America and other countries have carried out a lot of research work.

Rural parking guidance system is an important part of it intelligent transportation system. It has been applied to the city center. The United States, Germany and other transportation developed countries have promoted it in more than a dozen cities. By using the parking guidance system, it has greatly alleviated the rural traffic congestion, reduced the road occupation, reduced the vehicle exhaust emission and noise, significantly improved the utilization rate of the original parking facilities, and achieved good social and economic benefits. There are similar demonstration projects in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and some results have been achieved, but the technical means and the content expression form of induction display are different.Through the development in recent years, various software and hardware technologies of rural parking guidance system have been immature. The parking lot system has laid a good foundation for the promotion and implementation of the system: the development of wireless communication technology, especially mobile communication technology, provides great convenience for the construction of rural traffic information. Many international famous communication companies, such as GSM mobile communication network, have developed data communication products. LED technology is more and more used in many industries to provide users with all kinds of information because it can work all day and continuously and has good display effect. At present, the products of domestic companies have been improved in display effect, interface technology and operation stability than before.GI technology can easily realize the combination and matching of data and geographic information. Now it has been widely used in the development of various geographic information systems. It makes a comprehensive analysis of the database to form a topic oriented conclusion, and the application category of data warehouse and data mining technology. Although there is no good specific application at present, this is the development trend and application direction of data processing. The number of private cars in China has exceeded 26 million.Due to the lack of parking lot planning in cities in the early years, by the end of 2009. The popularity of cars makes parking spaces nervous. The construction of three-dimensional garage is favored by major cities because it can save space. Three-dimensional garage has also become a future trend of parking lot development. For the three-dimensional garage, the lifting and transverse three-dimensional garage is widely used in China. Because the parking environment is more complex, a group of parking spaces are generally multi-storey structure.It is difficult for car owners to intuitively find empty parking spaces after entering the three-dimensional garage. They often find that there are free parking spaces on the reorganized parking spaces after the vehicles are driving, which not only consumes parking time, but also easily leads to scratches between different vehicles. The empty parking space in the current direction is displayed. The parking space guidance system uses the LED parking space display installed at the entrance of the garage and at the entrance of each internal channel. To guide the owner to select the parking channel.The side of each group of parking spaces in the garage near the channel is equipped with parking space indicator lights to display the idle status of the reorganized parking spaces. When a group of parking spaces are full, the parking space indicator will display red. If there are free parking spaces in this group, the indicator will display green. The steel tray is often displaced, and the parking space of the three-dimensional garage is relatively unstable. The conservative parking system will inevitably interfere with the parking space detector.