Besides traditional sensors, video is being increasingly used as a sensor detecting parking space availability. Moreover, when combined with automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), video can perform other functions such as parking enforcement and payment.
Besides traditional sensors, video is being increasingly used as a sensor detecting parking space availability. Moreover, when combined with automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), video can perform other functions such as parking enforcement and payment.
Traditional sensors such as ultrasonic and magnetic ones are used to detect whether a space is occupied or empty. Yet increasingly, video has become a viable, and even more economical, alternative. “Some surveillance players, such as Dahua, are deploying video detection for city street application,” said Jieruo Zhang, Parking Solution Manager at
Dahua Technology. “Every space detection camera covers several spaces – two or three spaces, sometimes even six spaces in underground parking garage and parking building, which is very economic and convenient for construction.”
ALPR
As opposed to other traditional sensors, video allows another important functionality: ALPR, which can help perform a variety of tasks such as parking enforcement.
Genetec’s ALPR solution AutoVu, for example, can help the end user gain better oversight into the vehicles parked in their facility or on the streets. The solution entails an ALPR camera either installed on top of an end user-operated vehicle doing rounds inside a lot, or fixed on top of a free-floating style parking lot with no barricades. On city streets, vehicles mounted with ALPR cameras can also be deployed to help with parking enforcement.
“The way ALPR makes parking smarter is it allows parking enforcement officers to work more efficiently. In the past, if someone wanted to see if a vehicle was allowed to park there, they walked along, checking if the person had a permit hanging at the window. It's very time consuming. With ALPR you can actually do it all without looking. The cameras will validate whether or not someone should be in area,” said Charles Pitman, Product Marketing Manager at Genetec.
ALPR not only helps streamline operations but helps make things easy for driver, too. Take a college campus, for example. As opposed to how things were done in the past, whereby at the start of every semester the students stand in line to buy paper permits, they can now pre-register online and validate by way of ALPR to go in and out of the lot.
"With ALPR … you are not tying the permit to a physical thing, it's a virtual permit tied to the person's license plate. You just go online, pay for permit, type in your license plate and you're done,” Pitman said.
Besides pre-payment, ALPR also facilitates payment for transient parking. Already ALPR is seen in many a parking lot whereby the driver gets his license plate captured upon entry, types his license plate number at the kiosk at the end of the stay, pays and leaves. Better, upon exit, the payment can be deducted automatically so the driver doesn’t even have to make a trip to the APS. “We offer a mobile app for commuters which has integrated payment gateway. Commuter could add any amount to his wallet which is mapped to his/her license plate. The commuter could just drive through the exit point and the amount will be deducted automatically,” said Manu Tayal, General Manager of the IoT Center of Excellence at Happiest Minds Technologies.
For citywide on-street parking, ALPR can be handy as well. Acer, for example, has a solution that consists of a kiosk with an ultrasonic sensor attached to it, and a camera. The former detects whether a space is parked or not. Once the car is parked, the camera captures the vehicle’s license plate and the time of entry/exit. That information, then, is transmitted to the payment system, which deducts the value from the driver’s account.