Automated parking management system: Parking lot occupancy detection

Problem: Parking spot monitoring

Are enough parking spots available for your customers or staff? The answer is a parking spot monitoring system using computer vision, which includes real-time counts of available parking spots, parking analytics, and more.

Automating your parking spot management system will mean less menial work for employees and overall improvements in your facility management. Powered by computer vision algorithms, Groundlight’s parking spot detector includes easy integration with your on-site cameras that are already working throughout your facilities.

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Current alternatives for parking spots monitoring on-site

Lots of oversight required, natural human error inevitable, and time-consuming: here's a look at the current alternatives to a non-automated parking spot detector for your business.

• Manually checking on-site camera surveillance systems: While a number of facilities use high-res cameras for their parking lot surveillance, not having an automated parking spot detector in place means frequent checks by employees and management. Instead, a computer vision powered solution gives facility managers notifications in real-time, saving lots of time and energy.

• Frequent hands-on monitoring by employees: Facility managers must resort to making sure that their employees conduct manual checks for parking spaces or do it themselves, in order to tell if there's enough parking spots available at the facility. Manual checks such as this leaves more room for natural human error, not to mention being time consuming.
• Traditional computer vision solutions: If your business has more than one location, a number of outdated computer vision solutions can not only be expensive, but take up to weeks or even months to implement. These traditional versions also require lots of oversight, including updates to a customized model any time the environment changes or for each new location where you want to implement a computer vision model.

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Solution: Parking spot management using computer vision

Groundlight's parking spot detector powered by computer vision is designed to count empty parking spots, where the total number of available spots is auto-populated on the parking lot signs.

Groundlight’s computer vision technology integrates with the security cameras already installed at your facility, as Groundlight’s software is designed to operate with a number of WiFi and USB-powered cameras typically used by most businesses.

To integrate with your security cameras and start counting empty parking spots, either a Groundlight employee or your own software engineer would simply write an application using Groundlight’s Python SDK.

Groundlight uses Object Detection to identify empty parking spots in the parking lot. No need to gather data or train the model, all you need to do is simply allow Groundlight’s computer vision platform to start analyzing the images coming from your camera feed. 

You can anticipate Groundlight's computer vision software to work on day one and know the occupancy of your parking lots in real-time. This is because Groundlight’s computer vision platform uses humans-in-the-loop (HITL) to ensure that if the scene changes, the image is escalated to a real human (a Groundlight staff member) who can confirm the right answer.

With Groundlight’s computer vision technology, it is also possible to gather extensive parking analytics on the parked vehicles at your business on and off the street. Important data such as the average daily occupancy rates and high-traffic areas of your business will allow you to effectively manage your parking lot.

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Key features of Groundlight's computer vision parking spot detector

Here are some of the key features of Groundlight's parking spot detector using computer vision:

• Simple installation and integration: The software can be deployed on Day One with Groundlight’s Python SDK.
• Real-time notifications and easy remote access: Groundlight’s computer vision detector allows site managers to instantly know the number of available parking spots.
• High-accuracy: Groundlight staff verify any images where the machine learning model is unclear, ensuring accurate results at all times.

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Impact of parking spot detection using computer vision

With affordable and easy integration, a parking management system powered by computer vision can amplify your facility management. Groundlight offers an automated parking spot detection system using the latest technology in machine learning and object detection.

Check out how your business management can improve by implementing automated parking spot detection at your facility:

• Lower operational costs: Automating your parking spot management reduces the need for staff who are managing a parking lot to manually count available parking spaces.
• Improved customer experience: Customers benefit from a smoother parking experience.‍
• Fewer traffic bottlenecks: Speed up the parking process for customers to arrive and exit.