Introduction
Finding a free parking space can sometimes be a nightmare. Having a good parking management system integrated with LED displays or a parking app can tell you how many parking spaces are available, where they are located, and help you navigate to a free spot. For others, the challenge is that your company has reserved slots that are full of unauthorized vehicles and your employees are not able to park on the spots reserved for them. In this case, you can use LP reading and License plates inclusion and exclusion rules to alert you if a car with an unfamiliar license plate is found. Both of these parking solutions can help us save a lot of time and minimize stress and can be designed quite easily with only 3 operators in FLOW Insights. In this guide, you will learn how to set up parking lot monitoring as well as how to create notifications when an unfamiliar car is present in your parking lot. These are only some of the many use cases of FLOW and they also include traffic monitoring and management, traffic violation detection, retail analytics, or security.
If you are new to FLOW - read this article or watch our webinar to get familiar with the basics. Links to more FLOW-specific guides can be found below.
What will you learn from this article?
1. How to create a basic parking monitoring setup.
2. How to create special rules based on vehicle categories and license plates.
3. How to visualize parking violations on the dashboard.
Don't have FLOW Insights yet? Download it here for free!
Guide
To define what area is the parking lot section we want to monitor, so we need to create a zone over the parking spaces we want to monitor. In our example, we are using 2 spaces for simplicity. To create the zone we click on the create a spatial menu and then drag a freehand shape. Then we name it for clarity and drag it over to the canvas on the right.
To detect only cars and not any pedestrians or bicycles passing through the zone we add a category filter to the canvas. We double-click it to open its menu and we tick boxes to select appropriate vehicle categories. We connect the category filter above the zone so that all the data is filtered by category first before going into the zone spatial filter.
The last filter we add to the sequence is the License Plate property filter. To make sure that only the unfamiliar cars are counted we need to pick the selection mode "not matching" and then type in all the authorized License plates that are allowed to park in this parking lot. When finished, connect this filter to the zone you defined for the parking lot to feed in only the data that was processed by the previous two filters. By connecting these 3 filters in the correct sequence we are able to get the data you need. Thanks to this intuitive visual programming and variety of available filters and operators you can get almost any type of data you need.
To finish we will make sure that we are able to interpret the data at a glance and for that, we will use the FLOW dashboard. We would like to know when an unauthorized car is present. To become aware of when that happens, we add a value widget to the License Plate property filter and select a red coloring to highlight it.
To get more information on the car that violated the reserved parking we add a table widget to know the license plate of the violation vehicle as well as how long has the car been there or it's color. We can then communicate this data using open API or Webhooks further so you can for example link them to SMS or email notifications.
Conclusion
You have learned how to set up parking monitoring in a couple of simple steps and even how to create a reserved parking lot. We offer multiple real-time solutions that run FLOW, each suitable for different use. You can for example start with a smart camera which is well suited for simple scenarios such as parking. For more complex traffic scenes, there is the TrafficEmbedded which can run multiple cameras and can be used for example for traffic control. You can also use any number of existing IP cameras with our on-premise TrafficEnterprise solution to monitor traffic and parking and manage traffic across the whole city. Apart from FLOW parking DataFromSky also offers a dedicated parking management solution the Parking Detection including a CMS for easy parking lot management.
We hope that you have enjoyed this guide.
Do you have any questions? Do not hesitate to contact us here.
Links
• Do you have more questions? Contact us!
• Follow us on Linkedin.
• Learn more about FLOW.
• Visit our homepage to view products and news.
Thank you for your interest! Have a great day!
Let the traffic flow - with FLOW!