THESIS
2022
1 online resource (xi, 122 pages) : illustrations (some color)
Abstract
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...[
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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.
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