Using Computer Vision Techniques for Parking Space Detection in Aerial Imagery

Author(s):  
Andrew Regester ◽  
Vamsi Paruchuri
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 274
Author(s):  
Mohamed Marzhar Anuar ◽  
Alfian Abdul Halin ◽  
Thinagaran Perumal ◽  
Bahareh Kalantar

In recent years complex food security issues caused by climatic changes, limitations in human labour, and increasing production costs require a strategic approach in addressing problems. The emergence of artificial intelligence due to the capability of recent advances in computing architectures could become a new alternative to existing solutions. Deep learning algorithms in computer vision for image classification and object detection can facilitate the agriculture industry, especially in paddy cultivation, to alleviate human efforts in laborious, burdensome, and repetitive tasks. Optimal planting density is a crucial factor for paddy cultivation as it will influence the quality and quantity of production. There have been several studies involving planting density using computer vision and remote sensing approaches. While most of the studies have shown promising results, they have disadvantages and show room for improvement. One of the disadvantages is that the studies aim to detect and count all the paddy seedlings to determine planting density. The defective paddy seedlings’ locations are not pointed out to help farmers during the sowing process. In this work we aimed to explore several deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) models to determine which one performs the best for defective paddy seedling detection using aerial imagery. Thus, we evaluated the accuracy, robustness, and inference latency of one- and two-stage pretrained object detectors combined with state-of-the-art feature extractors such as EfficientNet, ResNet50, and MobilenetV2 as a backbone. We also investigated the effect of transfer learning with fine-tuning on the performance of the aforementioned pretrained models. Experimental results showed that our proposed methods were capable of detecting the defective paddy rice seedlings with the highest precision and an F1-Score of 0.83 and 0.77, respectively, using a one-stage pretrained object detector called EfficientDet-D1 EficientNet.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherzod Nurullayev ◽  
Sang-Woong Lee

The importance of vacant parking space detection systems is increasing dramatically as the avoidance of traffic congestion and the time-consuming process of searching an empty parking space is a crucial problem for drivers in urban centers. However, the existing parking space occupancy detection systems are either hardware expensive or not well-generalized for varying images captured from different camera views. As a solution, we take advantage of an affordable visual detection method that is made possible by the fact that camera monitoring is already available in the majority of parking areas. However, the current problem is a challenging vision task because of outdoor lighting variation, perspective distortion, occlusions, different camera viewpoints, and the changes due to the various seasons of the year. To overcome these obstacles, we propose an approach based on Dilated Convolutional Neural Network specifically designed for detecting parking space occupancy in a parking lot, given only an image of a single parking spot as input. To evaluate our method and allow its comparison with previous strategies, we trained and tested it on well-known publicly available datasets, PKLot and CNRPark + EXT. In these datasets, the parking lot images are already labeled, and therefore, we did not need to label them manually. The proposed method shows more reliability than prior works especially when we test it on a completely different subset of images. Considering that in previous studies the performance of the methods was compared with well-known architecture—AlexNet, which shows a highly promising achievement, we also assessed our model in comparison with AlexNet. Our investigations showed that, in comparison with previous approaches, for the task of classifying given parking spaces as vacant or occupied, the proposed approach is more robust, stable, and well-generalized for unseen images captured from completely different camera viewpoints, which has strong indications that it would generalize effectively to other parking lots.


Author(s):  
C. Henry ◽  
J. Hellekes ◽  
N. Merkle ◽  
S. M. Azimi ◽  
F. Kurz

Abstract. Emerging traffic management technologies, smart parking applications, together with transport researchers and urban planners are interested in fine-grained data on parking space in cities. However, there are no standardized, complete and up-to-date databases for many urban areas. Moreover, manual data collection is expensive and time-consuming. Aerial imagery of entire cities can be used to inventory not only publicly accessible and dedicated parking lots, but also roadside parking areas and those on private property. For a realistic estimation of the total parking space, the observed use of multi-functional traffic areas is taken into account by segmenting not only parking areas but also roads according to their purpose. In this paper, different U-Net based architectures are tested for detecting all these types of visible traffic areas. A new large-scale, high-quality dataset of manual annotations is used in combination with selected contextual information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) to depict the actual use as parking space. Our models achieve a good performance on parking area segmentation, and we show the significant impact of OSM data fusion in deep neural networks on the simultaneous extraction of multiple traffic areas compared to using aerial imagery alone.


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