Russia develops new application to help drivers quickly find vacant parking spaces using existing CCTV cameras

According to foreign media reports, Chelyabinsk, Russia will use computer vision and image recognition technology to solve the problem of parking space shortage. As part of the Smart City project, scientists from South Ural State University in Russia use installed CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras and specially developed programs to collect data, identify vacant parking spaces, and provide drivers with information about available parking spaces in the nearest parking lot.

(Photo credit: South Ural State University)

Igor Oleinik, a graduate student at the School of Economics and Management of South Ural State University, has proposed a new solution to the shortage of parking spaces. He designed a special software application that can use existing CCTV cameras to quickly inform drivers of convenient parking locations, thereby greatly improving the urban driving environment and making parking more efficient.

Because if the car is parked on the roadside, it will greatly reduce the traffic capacity of the city road, and the full car park will make it difficult to walk. In addition, the shortage of parking spaces often causes drivers to violate traffic rules. The new solution allows drivers to quickly and easily find free parking spaces, while significantly reducing the sensor cost of each parking space, because only existing CCTV cameras can be used.

In parking lots, conventional high-resolution CCTV cameras are already in use and have been applied to many parking lots, so there is no need to reinstall any special cameras or sensors, only the signals from CCTV cameras need to be processed. In addition, complex buildings such as shopping malls and entertainment centers also use similar systems in indoor parking lots, and even sensors are installed individually for each parking space. Moreover, this system can also be applied to open-air parking lots without installing a large number of sensors.