Parking is one of the indispensable journeys for drivers. Despite the total number of parking spaces seemed to be sufficient in Hong Kong, it is difficult and inconvenient for drivers to park in peak hours or dense areas. Limited and out-dated information provided for drivers to make a prompt decision navigating where to park leads to the long queue of cars outside car parks.

The direct stakeholders of a car park include drivers, car park operators and owners. Obtaining the vacancy and pricing information of parking spaces nearby, routing the fastest route to park, counting the duration of parking are the top values empirically articulated by sampled drivers from surveys and interviews. While for car park operators and owners, higher utilisation rate, better parking lots management, enh...[ Read more ]

Parking is one of the indispensable journeys for drivers. Despite the total number of parking spaces seemed to be sufficient in Hong Kong, it is difficult and inconvenient for drivers to park in peak hours or dense areas. Limited and out-dated information provided for drivers to make a prompt decision navigating where to park leads to the long queue of cars outside car parks.

The direct stakeholders of a car park include drivers, car park operators and owners. Obtaining the vacancy and pricing information of parking spaces nearby, routing the fastest route to park, counting the duration of parking are the top values empirically articulated by sampled drivers from surveys and interviews. While for car park operators and owners, higher utilisation rate, better parking lots management, enhanced operation efficiency and lower operation costs are the foreseeable targets for profit maximisation.

Therefore, the key question guiding the formulation of the solution is how to design a smart sensing solution that enable smooth operation management for car park owners and operators while soothing the inconvenience of drivers of accessing real-time information of car parks. All these demands and requirements rely on the real-time sensing of car parks which should be enabled by a robust and cost-effective solution without incurring significant increase of expenditures of stakeholders.

With such a goal and design methodologies, a new AI Camera with panoramic hybrid lenses, edge-computing for license plate recognition and LoRa wireless communication features is invented. Outperformed other existing cameras or overhead sensors, this new AI Camera can effectively detect the number of parking vehicles and their corresponding license in multiple parking lots in a row instead of only one. Hence, it brings enhanced performance and higher efficiency of license plate recognition while significantly lowering the hardware and installation costs which are the major hesitations of car park owners and operators for adoption.

Aiming for a fast-growing adoption rate, the solution, named Vacovio, is proposed to be blended into a business model of Device as a Service (DaaS), providing paid digital services to car park operators and parking platform companies. For car park operators and owners, Vacovio can detect vacancy and prevent inappropriate parking. For parking platforms, Vacovio can stream real-time data for car park vacancy and utilisation rate, as well as enabling other applications for their target users - drivers. As a result, the goal aiming to alleviate the inconvenience of parking can be achieved.