A brief discussion on the development history and prospects of reverse car search systems in domestic parking lots

    Since the reform and opening up, the living standards of the people have been continuously improved, and more and more cars have entered the homes of ordinary people. The number of private cars has increased rapidly, especially in recent years. The quiet advent of the era of automobile consumption has correspondingly led to the rise and development of the parking industry: cities have built a large number of parking lots to solve the problem of parking difficulties, and their construction scale is expanding, the equipment system is becoming more and more perfect, and the management technology is becoming more and more mature. For various public places such as commercial centers, large supermarkets, hospitals, restaurants, airports, and administrative centers, parking lots are important supporting facilities. The continuous improvement of their service level not only brings convenience to people's parking and speeds up the turnover of parking lot vehicles, but also establishes a convenient, efficient and humanized service image for operators, thus having good social and economic benefits.
 
　　However, the unprecedented scale of parking lots has not only alleviated the problem of parking difficulties, but also brought new troubles to car owners - difficulty in finding cars. Due to the large area and many parking spaces in the parking lot, the vehicles are parked densely, the direction is not easy to identify, and all the landmarks are mostly similar. When car owners return to the parking lot to pick up their cars, they often have forgotten where they parked their cars. In this case, car owners often look around blindly based on their memory, and sometimes use the car door lock remote control to find the car, which is time-consuming and laborious. The remote control has great limitations in finding the car. It is even more inconvenient to find the car when carrying purchased items. When the "difficulty in finding a car" situation intensifies and becomes an urban traffic problem alongside "difficulty in parking", the parking lot reverse car search system designed to solve this problem came into being, and with the continuous expansion of market demand, its development potential is constantly increasing.
 
　　1. From scratch - manual car search
 
　　When the problem of difficulty in finding a car first emerged, some large commercial parking lots that focus on customer experience usually sent a large number of staff with walkie-talkies to help customers find their vehicles as soon as possible. They were evenly stationed in the entire parking lot to help customers find their cars. This method is both labor-intensive and increases operating costs, which is a helpless move. Moreover, even if a group of people help to find the car, it is still very difficult to find a car quickly in the face of parking lots with thousands of parking spaces when they are not familiar with the car owner's car. They can only look for it one by one. If they are lucky, they can find it in more than ten minutes, but if they are unlucky, they have to spend half an hour. Or even longer.
 
　　It can be seen that manual car search is nothing more than increasing the number of people looking for the car, and the problem has not been solved at all.
 
　　2. Informationization reform-card search for car
 
　　Later, with the acceleration of China's information construction process, all walks of life have fully realized the importance of information management, and gradually started a comprehensive and scientific informationization reform. Parking lots are also gradually developing in the direction of informatization and digitalization, and guiding car owners to park in the parking lot by introducing advanced high-tech and equipment and adopting efficient management methods. In terms of reverse car search technology, the new car search method based on card search advertises "intelligent management replaces manual work" and quickly enters people's field of vision, replacing the original manual car search method, and is adopted by many parking lots in shopping malls, supermarkets and other places that focus on customer satisfaction.

    As it is the earliest reverse car search technology, the card search technology undoubtedly has defects. Card search is also called reverse car search, which mainly uses the card swiping positioning terminals (or card readers) distributed in various areas of the parking lot to swipe the card for positioning. There is a card swiping positioning terminal installed in each area of ​​the parking lot, covering several parking spaces. After the car owner parks the car, he must bring a specific parking card to swipe the card on the card swiping positioning terminal in the corresponding area. The time when the car owner arrives at the area point and the situation of the area point can be stored in the corresponding system server; and when the car owner returns to find the car, he must swipe the card again on a nearby query terminal to obtain his parking location information. Of course, the parking location information can only be a range of "the car is parked near the card swiping positioning terminal in a certain area", rather than accurate to "the car is parked in a certain parking space".
 
　　We can see that to successfully realize the card search, two major conditions must be met: 1. The car owner must apply for the corresponding parking card by himself and remember to carry it with him; 2. The car owner must remember to take the initiative after getting off the car-swipe the card on the nearest locator to locate. It seems that "intelligence replaces manual labor", but if we think about it carefully, we will find that the card-swiping car-finding technology still depends on people's active memory and active operation. The above two necessary conditions for success seriously restrict the functionality and practicality of the card-swiping car-finding technology, making it a flashy "pseudo-intelligence".
 
　　We often see users of the card-swiping car-finding technology have such doubts: "I have the time to apply for and swipe the card, I have already memorized where the car is parked." It can be seen that the card-swiping car-finding technology has obvious weaknesses and needs to be further improved. In fact, the card-swiping car-finding system was mostly abandoned shortly after it was put on the market. It only exists as a gimmick for merchants to promote their "humanized service". This is not only a waste of resources, but also causes losses to parking lot operators. Similar technologies include ticket-taking and barcode-based car search. A locator (or barcode printer) is also set up in each area of ​​the parking lot. After parking the car, the owner needs to obtain a receipt (or a barcode) from the locator in the corresponding area. When returning to find the car, the owner can obtain his parking location information by reading the receipt (or scanning the barcode) through the guidance machine. In addition, the market now also has mobile phone SMS car search systems, mobile phone QR code parking navigation, fingerprint recognition car search, etc., which look unique and novel, but in essence, they are the same as card-swiping car search, and they cannot get rid of the disadvantage of requiring customers to actively locate. I will not go into details here. Of course, card-swiping car search technology is still an important link in the development of car search technology from manual to intelligent. People have begun to turn their attention to this market and are more looking forward to new technologies for reverse car search.

    3. Intelligent Era - Video Car Search

    With the continuous advancement of science and technology, the parking industry has further developed. Before the concept of "video car search" was officially implemented, the reverse car search system first tried the video detection technology at the corners, that is, installing cameras at each corner of the parking lot to capture the passing vehicles in real time; when the owner returns to the parking lot to find the car, he can know at which corner the vehicle finally appears on the query terminal to determine that the vehicle is roughly parked near the area. Compared with swiping the card to find the car, the advancement of this technology lies in the system's attempt to automatically locate the vehicle, eliminating the trouble of the owner's active memory and active operation, making the technology more practical. Unfortunately, this technology was put into the market before it was mature, resulting in a lot of problems in actual use, and it died after only one or two projects.
 
　　Market demand has promoted the development of the industry and promoted the updating of product technology. Today, as the Internet of Things technology grows stronger and stronger, in the parking industry, parking lot guidance equipment companies headed by Xiamen Ketuo have taken the lead in developing an intelligent parking lot management system, integrating computer networks, video surveillance, image recognition and processing, and automatic control technologies to achieve fully automated management of vehicles in parking lots, that is, effective, scientific, and reliable management of vehicle access control, parking space retrieval, fee collection, verification, display, and proofreading of vehicle models and license plates. As a result, intelligent parking guidance, video fast parking fee collection systems, and card-free intelligent parking lots have gradually entered people's field of vision.
 
　　Just as the parking guidance system has entered the "visualization era" with parking guidance screens and indicator lights to indicate the status of parking spaces, the reverse car search system has truly entered the era of intelligent and fully automatic car search. One of the landmark events is that Xiamen Ketuo took the lead in proposing the concept of "video car search" and invested funds and technical forces to successfully combine parking guidance technology with video car search technology to develop the world's first fully automatic video car search system - parking lot car search machine. The birth of this system has made it no longer a dream for machines to replace manual car search. Its ability to fully automatically locate vehicles without the need for manual memory is of great significance in solving the problem of difficult car search. The
 
　　emergence of new inventions and new technologies must be tested in practice. In 2011, the first video car search system in China was successfully installed in the first six-star parking lot in Taipei City - the Taipei Tri-Service General Hospital parking lot, marking the realization of intelligent video car search and dispelling people's doubts about the practicality of this system. Soon, a wave of "video reverse car search" applications swept across the country. Soon, Shanghai Jing'an Kerry Center, Qingdao Hisense Plaza, Xiamen Huli Wanda Plaza, Beijing Qianmen Street Business District, Chongqing Kuixing Tower (also known as Kuixing Tower), Wuhan Hankou Railway Station and other places successively introduced this system. Subsequently, a large number of companies in the industry quickly followed up and imitated each other, including Hikvision and Dahua Technology, which were originally camera companies that focused on the surveillance market, and also joined the battle.
 
　　The video car search system uses the most advanced video image processing technology and license plate recognition technology. A camera is installed at each parking space, which can accurately, real-time and clearly capture the image information of the parking space, and then automatically recognize the parking information, such as the car image, license plate number, parking time, parking location, etc., and store it in the server for data processing. The owner does not need to take any active action when parking. After parking the car, he can leave on his own. When returning to find the car, he only needs to enter his license plate number in the car search query terminal for query. The system can automatically give the parking location of the vehicle and provide the best pick-up route calculated by intelligent calculation. In fact, the system also has a parking guidance function. Through the LED parking guidance screen that can display the number of free parking spaces in the current parking lot, and the red and green parking indicator lights installed above each parking space (the red light indicates that the parking space has been parked, and the green light indicates that the parking space is empty), etc., the owner is guided to quickly find an empty parking space for parking, which is convenient and fast.
 
　　There is no doubt that video car search technology has made great progress compared to card search and video car search at corners. The weakening of human roles and artificial memory in the system makes it have excellent operability and practical value. At the same time, considering the convenience of management, the video car search system also supports data analysis and mining, which can effectively count the parking lot traffic, utilization rate and other information, so that the parking lot management can timely grasp the parking lot usage status and speed up the vehicle turnover in the parking lot, thereby reducing operating costs, improving the management level of the parking lot, and improving customer satisfaction. However, we must also see that in actual applications, the video car search system still has some problems, such as how the reverse car search system can be more fully compatible and share resources with the original parking lot entry and exit management system and charging system, and how to make the video car search system better meet the usage habits of consumers and customers... These are the issues that need to be focused on in the future to improve the promotion and practicality of the system, and still need further discussion.

The video car search system installed next to the elevator at Xiamen Huli Wanda Plaza

    IV. Conclusion
 
　　The video car search system is an important achievement of the professional development of parking guidance industry technology, marking that China has entered a new stage in this field. Since the technologies of manual car search and card search have defects and deficiencies to varying degrees, it provides a huge opportunity for a more simple, practical, reliable and accurately positioned intelligent video car search system. With the development trend of people-oriented development in many commercial places or public construction projects, parking lots have become their important portals and images, and even one of the focuses of competition. Parking lot management systems including reverse car search have been valued and have achieved certain research results and application effects. In the future, the internal management system of parking lots will inevitably develop in the direction of intelligence and video. As an essential part of the construction of the city's static intelligent transportation system, the intelligent video car search system is a general trend and imperative, both in terms of academic research and practical application.