The increasing numbers of private vehicles have given rise to the issue of reduced parking space.
The increasing numbers of private vehicles have given rise to the issue of reduced parking space. Many of the developed and developing countries are struggling with this, but now, here is a company that has come up with an innovative solution to the problem.
Parking Spotter, a Romanian company, has a solution that helps end users find the closest available parking spot and parking owners to improve operational flows, all by analyzing the video images from cameras installed in the parking lot.
Speaking to asmag.com, Ovidiu Ciurte, Product Owner of the company explained that the key differentiator for the company in the smart parking industry is that they use video analytics for identification of an available parking spot.
“We started this solution from the assumption that all decent parking in the world has video surveillance for security reasons, so we decided to reuse that video surveillance infrastructure in order to obtain a vital information for all cities, airports, stadiums, shopping centers, that of availability of parking spots,” Ciurte said.
He added that the information is advantageous to businesses that use this solution mainly from two perspectives. First, it increases the end-user satisfaction by helping them to find the closes available spot within minutes, with the company’s mobile app. Second, it helps obtain a powerful set of business intelligence reports regarding parking occupancy over time, average parking time, heat map, no parking zone alarms and so on.
The technology behind it
Parking spotter is a combined cloud and on premise software solution. Ciurte said that taking into consideration that the company is dealing with security systems, they decided to run the analytics inside parking owners’ network and from there send only the status of the parking spot, through a secure connection to their cloud platform.
“So, inside the parking owners’ network we will install our video analytics application, which will receive video streams from existing / new security cameras, analyze the images and send the data to our cloud platform,” Ciurte said. “In this moment we have an integration with Milestone Systems, in order to receive any stream, from any camera connected to it. The end-user mobile app will connect to that cloud platform, receive information regarding spots in the region of interest and start end-user’s GPS Solution (like Waze, Google Maps and so on) for guiding him to selected available spot. Parking owners will be able to connect through a web client to our platform, to access the reports available for his parking.”
Factors that could drive demand
The obvious factor that is driving demand for the product is the increase in the number of vehicles and the lack of space to park. Apart from this, Ciurte points out that the use of the solution improves customer satisfaction, decreases traffic and pollution inside their facilities, obtains more business intelligence from their parking and reuse an existing infrastructure.
And the good news for security systems integrators is that the company considers them to be at the center of their business model.
“By partnering with us the Integrators will have a lot of benefits like upselling into existing accounts, differentiating on the market by offering a beyond security solution and obtaining a recurring revenue from our subscription license model,” Ciurte said.
As a recognition of their efforts the company was ranked first in the Milestone Kickstarter Contest 2017 early this year.