CNN-Based Two-Stage Parking Slot Detection Using Region-Specific Multi-Scale Feature Extraction

Although it is well-known that the two-stage approach outperforms the one-stage approach in general object detection, they have similarly performed in parking slot detection so far. We consider this is because the two-stage approach has not yet been adequately specialized for parking slot detection. Thus, this paper proposes a highly specialized two-stage parking slot detector that uses region-specific multi-scale feature extraction. In the first stage, the proposed method finds the entrance of the parking slot as a region proposal by estimating its center, length, and orientation. The second stage of this method designates specific regions that most contain the desired information and extracts features from them. That is, features for the location and orientation are separately extracted from only the specific regions that most contain the locational and orientational information. In addition, multi-resolution feature maps are utilized to increase both positioning and classification accuracies. A high-resolution feature map is used to extract detailed information (location and orientation), while another low-resolution feature map is used to extract semantic information (type and occupancy). In experiments, the proposed method was quantitatively evaluated with two large-scale public parking slot detection datasets: SNU and PS2.0 datasets. In SNU dataset, the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance with 95.75% recall and 95.78% precision.