Parking Space Information Monitoring by Millimeter Wave SAR Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This paper proposes a parking space information monitoring system by millimeter wave synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Parking space information that people are concerned about includes vacant parking place, parking place occupied by obstacles and place parked by vehicles. Specially, the free parking space detection is an important module for the parking guidance system (PGS) that can help drivers to find parking space efficiently. In this system, we obtain high resolution SAR images of parking lots at first. Then, in order to define the free parking space, Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method is exploited to leach the candidate regions occupied by vehicles from millimeter wave SAR images. Next, the system utilize visual saliency detection method to extract obstacles from the non-parked parking space acquired by pre-detection. Ultimately, the three types of information have been determined, including vacant parking space, parking space occupied by obstacles and the parked place. Experimental results prove that the integrated scheme performs well in parking information determination.