Sensor Fusion-Based Vacant Parking Slot Detection and Tracking

This paper proposes a vacant parking slot detection and tracking system that fuses the sensors of an Around View Monitor (AVM) system and an ultrasonic sensor-based automatic parking system. The proposed system consists of three stages: parking slot marking detection, parking slot occupancy classification, and parking slot marking tracking. The parking slot marking detection stage recognizes various types of parking slot markings using AVM image sequences. It detects parking slots in individual AVM images by exploiting a hierarchical tree structure of parking slot markings and combines sequential detection results. The parking slot occupancy classification stage identifies vacancies of detected parking slots using ultrasonic sensor data. Parking slot occupancy is probabilistically calculated by treating each parking slot region as a single cell of the occupancy grid. The parking slot marking tracking stage continuously estimates the position of the selected parking slot while the ego-vehicle is moving into it. During tracking, AVM images and motion sensor-based odometry are fused together in the chamfer score level to achieve robustness against inevitable occlusions caused by the ego-vehicle. In the experiments, it is shown that the proposed method can recognize the positions and occupancies of various types of parking slot markings and stably track them under practical situations in a real-time manner. The proposed system is expected to help drivers conveniently select one of the available parking slots and support the parking control system by continuously updating the designated target positions.