A Smart Parking System using Raspberry pi

1 | P a g e
A SMART PARKING SYSTEM USING RPI
Azhar Mithani1
1
Computer, Pune University, (India)
ABSTRACT
The main motive behind this technology is to reduce and secure the parking issues in metro cities. They
technology is designed to solve the daily problems of parking in many places like malls, multiplex, award
functions, auditorium etc. The aim and purpose is to scale down an efficient working model of a vehicle parking
system for accommodating vehicles within a limited area. The goal is to provide better security and reliability
with an advanced vehicle parking system. Architects and designers are finding various possible solutions to
reduce this people problem.
Keywords: Automated Parking, Camera, Mechanism Prototype, Pi cam, Raspberry Pi.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent times, many people have been facing an issue with parking and it is especially painful when in an elite
function, mall etcetera and in big metropolitan cities like Delhi, Maharashtra, Ahmedabad the problem is on a
day to day basis. To avoid such issues, we use the dexterity of modern technology which can give us fast,
efficient and environmentally sound solutions.
II. HISTORY AND BACKGROUND
There have been numerous occasions of crime such as a robber entering a crowded area, vehicle being stolen
even from plush areas even if the area was surveilled by a watchman. The first automated parking system was
developed by Max Miller in 1925 in New York city which was never practically used. It was Eric Jaulmes who
invented a vehicle management system in 1964 which had a valet drive into directly into an elevator. The
automated and intelligent systems will always be helpful to secure and manage the parking area even by a single
watchman or the owner themselves to manage the and secure the parking more reliably.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN AND REQUIREMENTS
The paper’s main objective is to use the parking space effectively and offering better security making the
parking system more reliable and easy to use. The WIFI technology of raspberry pi 3 model B along with a
Camera and a cam scanner will be used to control and manage the system. A database will be used to record
every person’s vehicle by their face and an RF-ID will be used to recognize the parking space for vehicle and
the details would be shown to the administrator for complete transparency. The admin would also be able to
access the whole parking system manually in case of any emergency.

2 | P a g e
Fig. Block Diagram of Parking Unit
3.1. Specification of Requirements
The Raspberry pi 3 model B is a debit card sized microcomputer having a 64/32-bit ARM Cortex A-53 and quad
core with a clock frequency of 1.2 GHz. It has an on board 802.11n WIFI with Bluetooth 4.0 and has 40 GPIO
pins. It also has CSI camera port for connecting a Raspberry Pi Camera and a DSI display port for connecting a
raspberry pi touchscreen display. The RF-ID will be connected to a Raspberry Pi to detect if there is already a
vehicle in the parking place. The GPIO ports of the Raspberry Pi will be connected to the RF-ID which will
detect whether the space is available to park or not.
Fig. GPIO Ports along with Hardware Description in Raspberry Pi

3 | P a g e
3.2. THE PARKING SYSTEM WITH IMAGE PROCESSING
The image processing will be done with the help of camera as soon as the person driving the vehicle steps out of
the vehicle and steps in the specified area for face recognition the face recognition will be done and the face
scanned if found in database then it will return the vehicle associated with that scanned face to the ground or
else an entry will be made for that person’s face in our database while based on the weight of the vehicle the
parking ticket will be generated in parallel while the scanning of face is being done. After the driver pays the
ticket and steps away from the vehicle the extended metal ramp will slide inside and lift the vehicle to the floor
wherever the parking is available based on an efficient algorithm and then the ramp will put the vehicle in that
empty slot and change its value in the database to ‘parked’ from ‘empty’ along with the id of the image
processed as its key. Whenever the person again returns and again steps in the face recognition area the face will
be searched in the database and if match is found in the database then the vehicle will be shifted to the slider and
it will be brought to the ground and slider will go again to its original position. There would be multiple
Raspberry Pi for multiple entries from different places and all of them will be connected to same database for
convenient parking management.
Fig. Flowchart for Parking space selection
3.3 . PRESENT SOLUTIONS AND SYSTEMS
a) Multilevel Parking
There are many malls and auditoriums which use this solution which is basically providing large space of
parking in underground levels so that there is ample space even for a national holiday crowd so that there is no

4 | P a g e
issue in parking. The disadvantage of this solution is that the cars are parked anywhere in the floor which wastes
a lot of space and many times people just forget where they parked their vehicle and there is also a chance of
robbery from your car or your car being damaged and sometimes even if the first floor has empty space people
park in the second floor which wastes a huge amount of resources. The floors are of significant height which
again adds to waste of space. Now a day the officials have employed staff people for guiding the people to park
their vehicles in the right slot to save space but since the floors are very large it needs large staff to manage a
single floor which is again not an efficient use of staff. There are chances of crimes being committed on normal
days since there are not much people on a floor and there is rarely any network signal on your phone when in
underground parking.
Fig. Multilevel Parking
b) Ground Parking
Instead of parking on floors this method utilizes the simple concept of parking in an open area instead of
underground parking or high floor parking. Some malls or multiplexes use an empty area or ground nearby for
providing parking space to people. The vehicle is parked in open by the normal people and so it wastes a lot of
space which can be utilized for parking. Again, the parking is done in an open ground so there is a high chance
of your vehicle getting a dent or being damaged and in some cases the cars are also stolen which is a big
problem. The security and reliability of this system is very less though there are some guards and watchman's

5 | P a g e
who take care of your car and people to direct you while you park your car to utilize the space of ground
efficiently. This system is not very effective.
Fig. Ground Parking
3.4. COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS
The sole reason of comparison is to give you an idea about relative efficiency and effectiveness of systems. The
first advantage in our system is that a lot of space is saved on every floor as we are sure that no drivers will be
there on any floor in our system the height of each floor will be slightly higher than height of the average car
(although it will be able to accommodate a mid sized sports utility vehicle) which would be significantly less
than the currently used systems which will ultimately save a lot of space as we advance on every floor. The
second advantage is that as we are using an automated system with an efficient algorithm to utilize parking
space there are no chances of human error. Since the system is automated the user has an advantage that they
themselves do not need to go to parking space in any floor which saves a lot of their time. As the face
recognition system stores the driver’s face in database they also need not remember where their car was parked
because our Raspberry Pi’s database runs the searching function and does it for them. As the parking ticket is
also automatically generated based on the weight of the vehicle they is practically no human involvement
required making the system automated in true sense. The Raspberry Pi can also calculate the total revenue
generated from the parking tickets which is a bonus to the owner.

6 | P a g e
IV. FIGURES AND TABLES
Variety of OS’s supported by Raspberry Pi
Fig. Various Operating Systems supported by Raspberry Pi
V. CONCLUSION
As is clearly visible by the paper the conclusion is as, the issue of parking in malls, auditoriums, big buildings
etc is solved by this technique. This solution is quite advantageous than most of the current solutions and
provides security and facility along with reliability while providing a better approach.
REFERENCES
Journal Papers:
[1] Michael Strasser,DanielMauser,SahinAlbayrak,Mitigating traffic problems by integrating smart
parkingsolutions into an interconnected ecosystem,2016 IEEE Symposium on Computers and
Communication (ISCC)
[2] Yanhong Liu;Jinping Guo,The relatedresearch of urban parkpatch characteristic and thermal
environment,2011 International Conference on Remote Sensing, Environment and Transportation
Engineering.

7 | P a g e
[3] J. M. Keneipp,Electronics and management of major parking and related transportation systems,
30th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference.
[4] Daniel Calderone,EricMazumdar,Lillian J. Ratliff,S. Shankar Sastry,Understanding the impact of parkingon
urban mobility via routing games on queue-flow networks,2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and
Control (CDC).
[5] Pablo Sauras-Perez,AndreaGil,JoachimTaiber,ParkinGain: Toward a smart parkingapplication with
valueadded services integration,2014 International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo(ICCVE)

A Smart Parking System using Raspberry pi

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to A Smart Parking System using Raspberry pi (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

A Smart Parking System using Raspberry pi