Internationale Partnersuche

Innovation & Technologie Angebot

Parking monitoring system for mobility assistant solution in Smart City

Country of Origin: Italy
Reference Number: TOIT20170627001
Publication Date: 4 October 2017

Summary

Italian SME, specialized in monitoring parking spaces, offers intelligent computer-vision software. It enables smart parking solution for providers of smart city/smart parking solutions. The system is available for demonstration to clients such as parking providers. The company seeks partners for commercial agreements with technical assistance and/or technical cooperation agreement.

Description

The Italian company is a cutting-edge enterprise operating in the fields of Internet of Things  (IoT). It’s active in the smart cities sector and provides solutions for monitoring parking spaces.

The system is able to recognize and monitor, in real time, the parking space variation (free/busy), send the detected information to smartphones mobile application (user/controller) automatically, and to web portal (manager).

The technology is based on a highly accurate computer vision algorithm that functions under a variety of lighting and weather conditions. The software works out of the box and accuracy can be further improved (99%+) with scene-specific calibration.

The solution exploits existing camera infrastructures, optimizing and converting them into a genuine Smart Cities platform open also to other economic players in order to add potential services. 

Currently, the software is exclusively applied to the smart parking domain, but related applications such as traffic monitoring can also be foreseen. Possible applications to unrelated domains, still within the image analysis field, can also be envisaged: the algorithm can be very accurately adapted to determine whether a specific type of object is present or not in an image.

The Italian company is offering its solution as technological support for parking and traffic flow to private or public sector companies. The partner sought are municipalities and/or companies engaged in parking management or in civil infrastructure for smart city functions. The company is looking for partners able to implement the system to expand its functionality according to their technical assistance feedback. For this matter, they seek commercial agreements with technical cooperation. They also consider the possibility to further develop the system through technical cooperation agreement working on projects related to urban traffic management.

Advantages and Innovations

- Internet of Things technology as support for artificial intelligence in urban mobility networks;

- computer processing on-site: data are elaborated close to cameras, minimizing installation costs and operational processes.

The video monitoring systems process the parking data on-remote or in a cloud data center due to the impracticability to monitor these directly on a continuous stream megapixel images. The solution solves this significant technical problem, thanks to a highly complex computational system that extracts, on-site, from video stream, information on parking occupancy in the form of text strings. Thus, the parking data are sent to users through easy mobile modem (as LTE - Long Term Evolution), and not through expensive fixed network installations, minimizing installation costs and operational processes. Unlike traditional parking monitoring systems that focus on new fragmented digital infrastructures (infrared sensors and road surface infrastructures), the technology exploits existing video surveillance infrastructures, optimizing and converting them into a genuine smart cities platform open also to other economic players in order to add potential services.

Also, the system has several advantages compared to the currently used sensor-based technology:

• A ground mounted sensor can only be installed in delimited parking spots, while the presented computer-vision solution can work in non-delimited parking strips and wider areas in which vehicles are not allowed to park.

• Detection accuracy is above 99%, comparable to ground mounted sensors.

• A single camera can cover in average between 12 and 20 parking spots in a standard city-center configuration.

Stage Of Development

Available for demonstration

Stage Of Development Comment

The system prototype has been demonstrated in operational environment with two pilots:

- conducted since June 2015 within the facilities of local University Campus reserved for professors; it involved approximately 1.000 users monthly up to August 2016; 

- conducted since February 2016 within the facilities of a private parking lot in Switzerland that involved approximately 100 users monthly up to August 2016.

Requested partner

The Italian company is looking for parking management companies or parking public organizations to implement the system according to the users needs.

The cooperation sought is commercial agreements with technical assistance. 

Technical cooperation agreement is also considered for adapting the software to the  customer and improving the market feedback