An intelligent driver location system for smart parking

It is often frustrating for drivers to find parking spaces, and parking itself is costly in almost every major city in the world. Here we propose a crowdsourcing solution by exploiting sensors in smart-phones to collect real-time parking availability information. We design a phone-based system to track a driver's trajectory to detect when they are about to leave their parking spot. We focus on the efficiency and accuracy of using a phone to monitor the driver's walking trajectory, applying a waist-mounted PDR method that can measure the driver's moving distance with a high accuracy. In addition, we design a map matching algorithm to calibrate the direction errors when the driver is in an indoor environment, using widely-available building floor plans. The results of our experiment show that we can achieve about 98% accuracy in estimating the user's walking distance, with an overall location error of about 0.48 m. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.