Smart Parking System Based On Optical Character Recognition

Successful implementation of smart parking systems can effectively reduce a lot of problems related to traffic congestion in urban areas. Wastage of fuel and time in search of a vacant parking space will be significantly reduced and the complete utilization of the available parking areas can make our cities really smart. Parking slot detection and user notification are the two major sections of a smart parking system. The empty parking space detection was initially done by deploying a number of sensors in the parking lot. It is highly expensive and complicated to install. But the advancement of image processing has enabled us to use images of the parking area to find out empty spaces. In this paper a comparative study of the various parking space identification techniques has been done. Also the image processing based system models has been presented as a replacement for sensor based systems. A very efficient and simple technique for parking slot identification based on optical character recognition (OCR) has been introduced in this paper. The camera installed in the parking lot captures the image of the parking area with specially numbered parking spaces. The OCR system recognizes the numbers which are not hidden by a vehicle parked over it and this information is used for identifying the empty spaces.