Identifying Parking Lots from Satellite Images using Transfer Learning

With the advent of digital image processing techniques and convolutional neural networks, the world has derived numerous benefits such as computerized photography, biological Image Processing, finger print and iris recognition, to name a few. Computer vision coupled with convolutional neural networks has attributed machines with a virtual intellectual ability to recognize and distinguish images based on several characteristics that may be impossible for the human eye to perceive. We have exploited this advancement in technology to particular use case of detecting number of empty and occupied parking slots from satellite images of parking lots. We have proposed a befitting sequence of classical image processing techniques and algorithms to perform pre-processing of satellite images of parking spaces. Moreover, we have proposed a Convolutional Neural Network model that takes as input these preprocessed images and identifies the empty and occupied parking slots with an accuracy of 97.73%. The potential benefits of using Neural Networks to realize the objective can be extended to open parking spaces of different configurations. This is due to the fact that establishing sensors over a large number of parking slots over a given open parking space can be a cumbersome and exorbitant task. The proposed model comprises of few convolutional layers and uses Rectified Linear Classification activation function.