Empty Lot

Right now, I'm thinking that there will be two components to my vacant parking space detection system: count the number of parking spaces in the camera's field of view, and detect the number of cars occupying spaces.

To help create a solution to the problem of counting the number of parking spaces, I took a few pictures of the parking lot at 1am when the lot was empty. If the lot were nearly full, counting parking spaces could be a fairly difficult problem for a computer since large trucks and vans could block the view of the lines or of whole parking spots. So I took a few pictures of the lot when it was empty to make my life a little easier.

Howdy

Hello and welcome to the exciting adventure that is "vacant parking space detection". So far, the focus of my efforts has been the generation of a viable training set and test set comprised of overhead images of a parking lot.

Being that I am currently in the Bay Area and have no access to P503 (the parking lot behind EBUI), I have decided to use a parking lot in Emeryville, CA, shown in the image on the right to train and test my vacant parking space detection software on.

Using a Cannon A540 set at 640x480 with a circular polarizing lens to cut down on glare, I took 33 pictures of a parking lot on 12/22/06. Unfortunately, over 2/3 of the pictures were ruined due to blurriness caused by my shaky hands. Since I took the pictures at dusk when the lighting was poor, the camera shutter was open a lot longer than it is when the lighting is good, requiring a steadier hand to prevent blurring. Oh well, live and learn.