Low-cost, High Accuracy Smart Parking Solution for Urban Areas

Intelligent parking systems are essential for enabling sustainable parking solutions. Searching for a free parking spot in urban areas wastes a significant amount of driver’s time and fuel and is a major contributor to total traffic congestion and resulting emissions. Vehicle presence detection is a fundamental aspect of this intelligent parking system and is currently accomplished by sensors that consume significant power to provide the required accuracy for most practical parking scenarios. There is a pressing need for low-cost smart parking devices that can maintain high accuracy and operate in almost all environmental conditions and deployment scenarios. In this paper, I propose a smart parking unit (SPU) that consists of a magnetometer sensor and a Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) connectivity module. Unlike other state-of-the-art approaches, data from multiple magnetometer sensors of adjacent parking spots are synthesized thereby drastically increasing the accuracy. In my approach, the impact of interference on the magnetometer sensor due to parking events in nearby parking spots is leveraged to improve detection accuracy as opposed to treating it as noise. This technique helps in accurately determining parking spot occupancy for most practical parking events such as front-park, reverse-park, pass-through-park, double-park, and drive-by events as well as various automobile makes and models, including electric vehicles (EVs).