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Parking a vehicle in traffic dense environments often leads to excess time of driving in search for free space which leads to congestions and environmental pollution. Lack of guidance information to vacant parking spaces is one reason for inefficient parking behaviour. Smart parking sensors and technologies facilitate guidance of drivers to free parking spaces thereby improving parking efficiency. Currently, no such sensors or technologies is in use for open parking lot. This paper reviews the literature on the usage of smart parking sensors, technologies, applications and evaluate their applicability to open parking lots. Magnetometers, ultrasonic sensors and machine vision were few of the widely used sensors and technologies on closed parking lots. However, this paper suggests a combination of machine vision, convolutional neural network or multi-agent systems suitable for open parking lots due to less expenditure and resistance to varied environmental conditions. Few smart parking applications show drivers the location of common open parking lots. No application provided real time parking occupancy information, which is a necessity to guide them along the shortest route to free space. To develop smart parking applications for open parking lots, further research is needed in the fields of deep learning and multi-agent systems.

Parking vehicle is a daunting task and a common problem in many cities around the globe. The search for parking space leads to congestion, frustration and increased air pollution. Information of a vacant parking space would facilitate to reduce congestion and subsequent air pollution. Therefore, aim of the paper is to acquire vehicle occupancy in an open parking lot using deep learning. Thermal camera was used to collect the data during varying environmental conditions such as; sunny, dusk, dawn, dark and snowy conditions. Vehicle detection with deep learning was implemented where image classification and object localization were performed for multi object detection. The dataset consists of 527 images which were manually labelled as there were no pre-labelled thermal images available. Multiple deep learning networks such as Yolo, ReNet18, ResNet50 and GoogleNet with varying layers and architectures were evaluated on vehicle detection. Yolo, GoogleNet and ResNet18 are computationally efficient detectors which took less processing time while Resnet50 produced better detection results compared to other detectors. However, ResNet18 also produced minimal miss rates and is suitable for real time vehicle detection. The detected results were compared with a template of parking spaces and IoU value is used to identify vehicle occupancy information.

The parking of cars is a globally recognized problem, especially at locations where there is a high demand for empty parking spaces. Drivers tend to cruise additional distances while searching for empty parking spaces during peak hours leading to problems such as pollution, congestion, and driver frustration. Providing short-term predictions of parking availability would facilitate the driver in making informed decisions and planning their arrival to be able to choose parking locations with higher availability. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide short-term predictions of available parking spaces with a low volume of data. The open parking lot provides parking spaces free of charge and one such parking lot, located beside a shopping center, was selected for this study. Parking availability data for 21 days was collected where 19 days were used for training, while multiple periods of the remaining 2 days were used to test and evaluate the prediction methods. The test dataset consists of data from a weekday and a weekend. Based on the reviewed literature, three prediction methods suitable for short-term prediction were selected, namely, Long-short term memory (LSTM), Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous variables (SARIMAX), and the Ensemble-based method. TheLSTM method is a deep learning-based method, while SARIMAX is a regression-based method, and the Ensemble method is based on decision trees and random forest to provide predictions. The performance of the three prediction methods with low volume of data and the use of visitor trends data as an exogenous variable was evaluated. Based on the test prediction results, the LSTM and Ensemble-based methods provided better short-term predictions at multiple times on a weekday, while the Ensemble-based method provided better predictions over the weekend. However, the use of visitor trend data did not facilitate improving the predictions of SARIMAX and the Ensemble-based method, while it improved the LSTM prediction for the weekend.

Due to the lack of wide availability of parking assisting applications, vehicles tend to cruise more than necessary to find an empty parking space. This problem is evident globally and the intensity of the problem varies based on the demand of parking spaces. It is a well-known hypothesis that the amount of cruising by a vehicle is dependent on the availability of parking spaces. However, the amount of cruising that takes place in search of parking spaces within a parking lot is not researched. This lack of research can be due to privacy and illumination concerns with suitable sensors like visual cameras. The use of thermal cameras offers an alternative to avoid privacy and illumination problems. Therefore, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a methodology to detect and track the cruising patterns of multiple moving vehicles in an open parking lot. The vehicle is detected using Yolov3, modified Yolo, and custom Yolo deep learning architectures. The detected vehicles are tracked using Kalman filter and the trajectory of multiple vehicles is calculated on an image. The accuracy of modified Yolo achieved a positive detection rate of 91% while custom Yolo and Yolov3 achieved 83% and 75%, respectively. The performance of Kalman filter is dependent on the efficiency of the detector and the utilized Kalman filter facilitates maintaining data association during moving, stationary, and missed detection. Therefore, the use of deep learning algorithms and Kalman filter facilitates detecting and tracking multiple vehicles in an open parking lot.

Parking lots are places of high air pollution as numerous vehicles cruise to find vacant parking places. Open parking lots receive high vehicle traffic, and when limited empty spaces are available it leads to problems, such as congestion, pollution, and driver frustration. Due to lack of return on investment, open parking lots are little studied, and there is a research gap in understanding the magnitude of CO2 emissions and cruising observed at open parking lots. Thus, this paper aims to estimate CO2 emissions and cruising distances observed at an open parking lot. A thermal camera was utilized to collect videos during peak and non-peak hours. The resulting videos were utilized to collect cruising trajectories of drivers searching for empty parking spaces. These trajectories were analyzed to identify optimal and non-optimal cruising, time to park, and walking distances of drivers. A new CO2 model was proposed to estimate emissions in smaller geographical regions, such as open parking lots. The majority of drivers tend to choose parking spaces near a shopping center, and they prefer to cruise non-optimal distances to find an empty parking space near the shopping center. The observed mean non-optimal cruising distance is 2.7 times higher than the mean optimal cruising distance. Excess CO2 emissions and non-optimal cruising were mainly observed during visitor peak hours when there were limited or no empty parking spaces. During visitor peak hours, several vehicles could not find an empty parking space in the region of interest, which also leads to excess cruising.