Towards a fully automated car parking system

Currently, payment at most car parking-lots is carried out in the following manner: a ticket machine at entrance prints a ticket with a bar-code for each car entering the parking-lot. This ticket is later scanned at a payment terminal to determine the amount to be paid. The procedure can be automated using face detection and recognition technology. This automation can help with the issue of ticket loss/car theft. This study describes an automated car parking system. The proposed system consists of a camera installed at the entrance/exit of the parking-lot. Frames are continuously acquired by the camera. If there is a detected face, it is registered in the database. When a driver is leaving, the face image is captured again at the exit of parking-lot and compared in the database to conclude the identity. The system at the parking entrance/exit is composed of the following processing modules: (i) image acquisition, (ii) vehicle and face detection, and (iii) feature extraction that also includes a feature comparison/classification module for face recognition. The authors propose suitable algorithms for each module and carry out ad-hoc experiments to check the feasibility of the proposed system.