Car-Park Occupancy Information System

D.B.L.Bong, K.C.Ting, N.Rajaee

Faculty of Engineering
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
94300 Kota Samarahan. Sarawak. Malaysia

Abstract - Drivers always face difficulty of finding available II. METHODOLOGIES

parking lot while entering into a huge parking area. A Car-Park
Occupancy Information System (COINS) is perhaps a viable Fig. 1 shows the flow chart of determining the car park
solution to reduce the amount of time needed to search for a occupancy. First, acquired images were processed by this
vacant car-park lot especially in a huge parking area. With this
algorithm to obtain information on the car park occupancy.
system, images captured by a surveillance camera were
processed in real-time to identify the occupancies of the parking This information is processed by a central control unit and can
lots. This occupancy information is further processed by a be distributed or broadcast to display panels located at
central control unit and distributed to display panels located at strategic locations at the parking area.
strategic locations at the parking area. The drivers can easily
find a vacant parking lot based on the information displayed on
the panels. Motivation for developing this system came from the
fact that minimum cost is involved because image processing
technique is used rather than sensor-based techniques. As
surveillance cameras are readily available in most car parks, this
technique is much cost effective than installing sensor on each
parking lot. The concept of this system and its initial works with
positive experiment results are presented in this paper.

Keywords -Image processing,, car-park occupancy, object

detection.

I. INTRODUCTION

Finding an empty car parking lot is always the problem for

car drivers. A lot of time and energy are wasted to find an
available car parking lot while entered into a car park space.
A lot of researches had been done for this problem to be
solved. Using an automatic gate is one way of getting some
information about the car-park occupancy. However, an
automatic gate is only able to count the number of vehicles
entering and leaving the parking area, thus giving a total
number of empty car parking lots available in that area. It
cannot tell the drivers on the actual locations of the empty car
parking lots.
To know the exact locations of the empty car parking lots,
Akihito et al. used sensors at each parking lot [1]. Using this
system, a comprehensive knowledge of the car park
occupancy is thus available. However, a lot of sensors have to
be used. This will be costly for a huge parking area and it also
Figure 1. Process flow in a COINS.
added up to the sensor maintenance cost.
Ozawa [2] used image sensors to get information for traffic A. Image Acquisition and Initiation
control, where images taken from camera located besides or Image acquisition is the first step of the system. Captured
above the road were used for vehicle detection and estimation images are stored into the system for further manipulation.
of the vehicle velocity. Very often car parks are already There are several methods to capture an image; examples are
equipped with CCTV cameras for surveillance purposes which using CCTV, digital camera and video camera.
may be used for automatic detection systems as well [3]. The In this project, images were captured using video mode
authors extended this idea and used it for determining car-park function in a digital camera. Single images were then
occupancy. Image processing based method is presented in extracted out from the video clip. This method was used to
this paper as a viable solution of getting the information on the reduce the noise produced from unintended vibration of the
car-park occupancy.
digital camera. The camera was mounted on a tripod and fixed
at a static area to capture video of the car park area. High
resolution of video clip is used as it can provide more
information for processing purposes.
Initialization in this project is separated into two. First is the
automatic location identifier to know the locations of every
car park lots. A manually edited image is used for this
purpose. The identified locations or coordinates of every car
park lots were stored as references in the database. Secondly,
the system needs to store an unedited zero occupancy image as
reference for future processing. Fig 2 shows an example of the
edited and unedited zero occupancy images.
Figure 2. Unedited and edited zero occupancy images.
Figure 3. Algorithm of initiation process.
Fig. 3 shows the algorithm flow of the initialization process.
The initialization process starts with the system detecting
yellow dots in the edited image using threshold control of the
RGB values. The result of this process is a binary image with
the white pixels representing the detected yellow dots. This
conversion is made due to easier manipulation and faster time
processing in this project. The white dots now erode into
single pixel white dots. Only single coordinate value needed
for each dots, so the dots have to erode into single pixel dots.
These single pixel dots’ coordinates were then store into a csv
file.
Another threshold control was used to maintain the near-
white color presence in the image. The detected white lines
are the boundary line of the parking lots. From the stored
coordinates, the system will find the nearest white color
surrounding it. After detecting the nearest white color, the
system would be able to know the coordinate of each car park
lots.
B. Object (Vehicle) Detection
Color subtraction is used to detect the presence of a vehicle
in each parking lot. Current image was subtracted with the
reference image. The difference between two images f(x,y)
and h(x,y), expressed as
g(x,y)=f(x,y)-h(x,y) (1)
is obtained by computing the difference between all pairs of
corresponding pixels from f and h [4]. Image difference was
converted to a binary image with the foreground object’s
pixels represented as 1 in the binary image, while background
becomes 0 as black color. If the object being removed is
darker than the background, then the image with the objects is
subtracted from the image without the object and if the object
is lighter than the background, the opposite is done. A sum
function was used to add the foreground object pixels in each
particular parking lot. Result of this sum function determines
the presence of a vehicle in that parking lot.
Figure 4. Object detection algorithm.
C. Image Edge Detection
The main purpose of edge detection used in this system is it
separates the shadow and object. More edge information is
found on object compare to shadow. The Sobel operator,
which approximates the first derivative, was used to detect
edges [5].
1 2 1

h1 =  0 0 0  (2)
− 1 − 2 − 1
0 1 2
h2 =  − 1 0 1 

(3)
− 2 − 1 0

 − 1 0 1
h3 = − 2 0 2 (4)
 − 1 0 1
Fig. 5 and 6 show the images before and after the Sobel
edge detection. After edge function, the system will calculate
detected edge pixels in that particular parking lots area and
based on this information to separates shadow and object.
From Table 1, notice that the final output shows the
particular parking lot is occupied with vehicle only when both
the object and edge detections give positive outputs. With the
absence of a positive output from either the object or edge
detection, that particular parking lot is considered empty.
III. RESULTS OF THE EXPERIMENT
Experiments were conducted to test the algorithm.
Computer monitor was used as a substitute to display panels to
show the occupancy of the car park area. Occupied parking
lots were displayed with red dots while unoccupied lots with
yellow dots. Different scenarios were simulated with one or
two vehicles parked at different lots. Table II and III shows
some of the experiment results.

TABLE II
EXPERIMENT RESULT WITH A SINGLE VEHICLE
Input Image with Single Car Output

Figure 5. Original image.

TABLE III
EXPERIMENT RESULT WITH TWO VEHICLES
Input Image with Two Car Output

Figure 6. Image after edge detection

D. The AND Function

The AND Function was used to give a final result based on
the outputs of the object and edge detections. Table 1 shows
the AND Function used in this project.

TABLE I
THE AND FUNCTION OF OBJECT AND EDGE DETECTION
Object detection Edge Detection Output

0 0 0
0 1 0
1 0 0
1 1 1
 IV. CONCLUSION REFERENCES

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from single images,” IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2004,
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Future challenge is in improving this system to operate on [4] R.C. Gonzalez and R.E. Woods, Digital Image Processing, 2nd ed., New
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1998.
hardware can be implemented by solving several real time
obstacles in both the hardware and software. Communication
used in the system can be enhanced using wireless technology.
Information from the COINS can be dispatched not only to
display panels, but can be extended to in-vehicle panels or
even to wireless products such as PDAs.