Abstract:
In the modern era, the process of detecting an unoccupied parking slot and payment collection for
parking in a huge parking space have become very monotonous task due to the growth of individual
usage of vehicles. Traditional and manual parking slots management in huge parking slot was
inefficient which required great number of human resources. Thus, there is a necessity of an
automated, intelligent and efficient parking system to overcome these issues. This study proposes
an intelligent parking space detection and monitoring system which can be used for searching the
unoccupied parking space, guidance towards the parking space, negotiation of the parking fee and
keeping the track of vehicles using number plate recognition. The proposed system is based on
image processing and optical character recognition techniques. Once a vehicle reaches the parking
entrance, the image of the vehicle and its registration number (number plate) are captured by
cameras and processed for automatically guiding the user (driver) to an unoccupied parking slot
and the system counts the number of vehicles parked and displays the parking status. Also the
system can be used for electronics parking fee collection based on number plate information. The
system provides facilities to categories vehicles as registered customer and new customer. For the
registered customers, the door will be opened without any delay in the entrance while a ticket will
be issued for new customers before opening the door. The proposed system was tested in a
simulated environment and obtained 96.15% accuracy using MATLAB as a software tool with
very minimal use of hardware resources to ensure that the cost of the system is very small. The
performance of the system is considerably outperformed the state of art system in terms of accuracy
and time efficiency
