"iPark" - Vison-Based Parking Monitoring System

Have you been in a rush and tried to find an available parking spot at an airport or shopping mall recently?  For those in the Boston area, have you tried parking at Logan recently? If you are frustrated, you are not alone. Well, perhaps a solution is just around the corner.

In this senior design project, a team of four BU students, M. Mole, P. Ward, I. Hochman, K. Lopez under the supervision of Profs. J. Konrad and W.C. Karl have embarked on the task of buidling a proof-of-concept complete system for:

• monitoring a parking area,
• detecting empty parking spots,
• alerting users to such spots via GUI (large screen, PDA, cell phone, etc.).

In order to minimize installation costs (minimal infrastructure modification), maximize flexibility (easy to set-up and disassemble), and encourage additional functionalities (e.g., surveillance), the system was designed to use wireless video cameras rather than floor-embedded pressure plates, electromagnetic sensors or RFIT tags. The system uses commercial IEEE 802.11 wireless cameras and standard PCs interconnected via standard WiFi network devices (WAPs and routers). The vision-based car detection algorithm is robust to vehicle type, color, size, etc.

At the recent 5th annual IEEE Student Design Contest at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) the system took top prize and was featured on WHDH Channel 7 News (click the image below to play the video - 54MB)

and a number web sites, for example:

• WHDH
• CCNews
• EDN
• Electronic Design