Video-Based Parking Occupancy Detection for Smart Control System

Street lighting is a fundamental aspect of security systems in homes, industrial facilities, and public places. To detect parking lot occupancy in outdoor environments, street light control plays a crucial role in smart surveillance applications that can perform robustly in extreme surveillance environments. However, traditional parking occupancy systems are mostly implemented for outdoor environments using costly sensor-based techniques. This study uses the Jetson TX2 to develop a method that can accurately identify street parking occupancy and control streetlights to assist occupancy detection, thereby reducing costs, and can adapt to various weather conditions. The proposed method adopts You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLO v3, Seattle, WA, USA) based on MobileNet version 2 (MobileNet v2, Salt Lake City, UT, USA), which is area-based and uses voting to stably recognize occupancy status. This solution was verified using the CNRPark + EXT dataset, a simulated model, and real scenes photographed with a camera. Our experiments revealed that the proposed framework can achieve stable parking occupancy detection in streets.