Edge–Artificial Intelligence-Powered Parking Surveillance With Quantized Neural Networks

The rapid development of urbanization has raised challenges for existing parking facilities to serve increasing parking demand. Being constrained by the limited urban land resources for newly constructed parking facilities, improving the efficiency of existing parking infrastructures relies more on an advanced parking management strategy. Video-based parking surveillance technology, with abundant information, easy installation, and powerful algorithms, is the most popular method to provide real-time parking information as the required data feed for a parking management system. Meanwhile, deep learning-based algorithms gradually replace traditional computer vision methods for video processing since the detection accuracy has been increased considerably by learning fine-grained features. However, the excessive computational complexity of deep learning-based algorithms occupies considerable computational resources, which certainly hurts the entire system’s efficiency. Due to the limited computing power of edge devices, most parking surveillance systems deploy video processing algorithms on a server or cloud platform, which raises concerns about data transmission latency and central computation pressure. Deploying efficient algorithms on an edge-side device is a potential solution to solve these problems. This article proposes an edge computing parking occupancy detection system with a quantized deep learning model. Model quantization is employed to boost the inference speed while maintaining accuracy. In addition, knowledge distillation is applied to improve the quantized model’s training performance. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the model’s superiority compared to state-of-the-art algorithms and the feasibility of edge computing. The proposed method can improve the accuracy and efficiency of parking surveillance systems. It is a systematic solution for obtaining parking information with limited computational resources.