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Parking spot occupancy and parking spot accumulation for volume and rate of traffic in parking lots. Wireless parking meter network in which drivers can quickly locate and navigate to available parking spaces. Enabling existing parking meters with IR occupancy sensors and low power RF transceivers can yield a selforganizing and self-managing distributed system while relying on techniques in mobile ad hoc networking.

Technology used: We propose an automated truck stop management system that can compute occupancy rates at stops and notify drivers about the availability of parking spots using variable message displays located about 30 or 40 miles before the stop. The proposed system will detect, classify and localize vehicles on the truck stops grounds by using a set of video cameras, from which video frames will be analyzed in real-time. Since exact knowledge of which stops are occupied will be available, variable message displays at the site of the stop itself will be able to direct drivers to free spots. Since in some cases it would be possible for two or more smaller vehicles to share a single parking spot, partial spot occupancy will also be determined by the system. The system will operate in two basic modes ? a day mode and a night mode, which would typically require different methods for vehicle detection. In order for vehicle dimensions to be accurately estimated, the managed sites will be calibrated so that the correspondence between the camera views and actual site dimensions are available.