Parking Today: What is smart parking and how does it work? What are some of the main issues smart parking aims to address for both consumers and operators?
Yaniv Iarovici: With the rising number of cars and urban congestion in general, the parking industry needs to increase efficiency by introducing new technologies to help automate parking space management, parking allocation and billing, and reduce reliance on the human factor.
As parking spaces become expensive real-estate assets, owners wish to maximize revenue on every spot.
As parking spaces become expensive real-estate assets, and owners wish to maximize revenue on every spot, “smart parking,” which refers to those technologies that are applied to improve management of parking spaces, is becoming more popular.
The key issues smart parking aims to address are:
Increased REVENUE: Smart parking helps parkers be payment compliant by making them aware of enforcement as it becomes more accurate. Smart parking also helps maximize parking occupancy and drive revenue.
Increased SAFETY: Smart parking increases safety by reducing traffic interference and the risk to other vehicles, pedestrians and traffic officers.
Decreased CONGESTION: Smart parking reduces congestion by increasing the number of vehicles serviced and referring drivers to free parking spots identified by the system, sometimes even based on car dimensions.
Improved CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: Smart parking creates a better experience for drivers through reduced wait times, clearly pointing drivers to available parking spots, and speeding up entry and exit to parking lots through automated payments.
Parking Today: Which technologies are currently used in most smart parking systems?
Iarovici: Generally speaking, some form of computer vision is used in most existing smart parking systems, without significant use of AI to provide actionable insights based on live/recorded video. A few examples include Access control and ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition), which do not typically incorporate AI elements that may increase their efficiency and speed.
Parking Today: How is AI impacting smart parking and why is it increasingly important? What are the main benefits of using AI?
Iarovici: AI enables both highly accurate identification of non-compliant vehicles in real-time and operation in a wide range of poor visual conditions where traditional solutions would fail. Digitization enables easy adoption to different locales, different license plate formats, and character sets.
By adding AI edge boxes, parking deployments can harness existing CCTV cameras deployed and add “AI smartness” to them at a system wide level.
Parking Today: Are there any safety concerns around AI in smart parking? If so, what are they and are there plans to mitigate against these concerns?
Iarovici: As in other market verticals, the leading players are always aware of risks and work with the entire ecosystem to address those in a holistic way.
AI helps address and reduce safety issues in a number of ways. By increasing accuracy and efficiency, as well as reducing risks and errors (human driven or otherwise), AI vastly improves the parking experience and safety for both drivers and operators. Additionally, edge AI increases people’s privacy, as only metadata needs to be transmitted and stored in the cloud, without sharing personal data.
Parking Today: Can you share some current examples of how AI is used in smart parking?
Iarovici: AI parking enforcement company WiseSight Technologies, based in Israel, recently leveraged the powerful Hailo-8™ AI processor into a smart surveillance system that collects and processes video from multiple cameras with automated vehicle tracking and billing by mail.
The automated solution uses License Plate Recognition (LPR), which creates a unique identifier for every vehicle upon entering the lot, then determines if payment is made.
The system also enables post-parking remote enforcement by generating data required for ticket-by-mail, increasing municipalities’ ability to capture the appropriate fees for their parking services.
By collecting and processing all parking video on the edge, WiseSight offers enhanced speed, efficiency and safety compared to parking enforcement by human supervisors.
After a successful pilot implementation in Israel, WiseSight is now expanding into new markets, beginning in North America.
Yaniv Iarovici, VP of Business Development at Hailo, can be reached at yanivi@hailo.ai
