An Inclined Bounding Box Method for Detecting Parking Spaces in Open Parking Lots using Aerial Images

Abstract

With the increasing population in urban areas, finding a vacant parking space has always been the biggest problem for drivers, which causes a series of issues such as energy waste and environmental pollution. Most outdoor parking lots cannot provide details of vacant parking spaces due to limited sensor technology in outdoor environments (i.e., poor resistance to external interference due to heat, light or signal noise). Although some studies are based on images captured by cameras, the existing vacancy detection methods using fixed-position surveillance cameras are not flexible and accurate enough for wide use. We propose an Inclined Bounding Box (IBB) method for detecting vacant parking spaces using aerial images. The IBB method takes advantage of the feature-description ability of deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to identify the status of parking spaces and develops an inclined bounding boxes calibration algorithm on the top layer of CNN architecture. The proposed IBB method can automatically identify parking spaces, locate vacant parking spaces with any direction and detect multiple parking spaces simultaneously. The experimental results show that the proposed IBB method is more accurate than the three counterpart methods.