Smart parking using OpenCV

Need parking somewhere random, how about parking in someone's drive? JustPark is the AirBnB for parking spaces. Our car broke down a few months back and at home, we thought it might be time to put the drive to work... and get a few quids here and there...

A couple of things followed :

• How do we know if someone will need to park in the drive so we can ensure the space is free and accessible when they arrive?
• What if someone parks in the drive when they should not have?

The first was easily sorted using dashboards in Home Assistant (maybe a story for another time).

For the second, there is OpenCV!

The overall flow would be:

• 1. Get list of bookings - todays whitelisted number plates
• 2. Check number plates of visiting cars
• 3. On entering ensure cars are whitelisted and log
• 4. If not, issue notification and log (auto log issue)
• 5. Reporting

1. Build

1.1 Step 1 - The camera

To analyse the video stream, we will need a RTSP feed. You should be able to use an IP camera for this. If you are about to get one, make sure its features include RTSP feed.

We are using a ESP32-CAM board (with esp32-cam-mb to easily program and power) setup using ESPHome.

I have ESPHome in my Home Assistant instance so the stream can be seen on dashboards.

For the stream to be available using RTSP, you can use this as a starting point: https://github.com/danuw/esphome-configs/blob/main/esp32-cam

> make sure to set a static ip for that camera

> placement of the camera facing the drive (and therefore the car parking) is important so the model recognising the plates works best.

1.2 Step 2 - ANPR

TODO

1.4 Step 3 - Package into a Balena image

TODO

1.3 Step 3 - Issue an event when a new car is spotted

TODO

Conclusion

I have been thinking about developing this for a while and I am glad this challenge gave me the motivation to get started...

Once, I noticed a car had parked but did not remember expecting any bookings. When I double checked, the driver (a repeated customer) explained after a while (too long) that they had booked for that day ... but with the neighbour ...

Next I will join with the real booking data and using playwright (or other UI automation framework) I may be able to log complaints automatically (though I am after the exercise than actually making this happen unless it happens too often).