CometPark

Parking issues are a great deal in the UTD campus. This app will tell where the parking spots are available in the open parking spaces within the campus.

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Inspiration

As the students of this university, we have observed that people face issues with parking in the open parking spaces. Looking for the closest available space to park takes significant amount of time. Delay due to parking can cause unnecessary delay in the regular schedule in day-to-day life and also cause annoyance. How about some app that can resolve this issue for good ?

What it does

CometPark allows users to locate the parking spots in a particular lot in real-time, and park as per convenience. There is no hassle and using the app is simple. Just look for the parking lot of your choice based on your color and go to the available spot as displayed by the app. The app also tells you the statistics specific to a parking lot - for instance, the number of parking spaces by each Category. It also tells you the nearest parking space based on proximity.

How we built it

We used Google Maps API to collect satellite images of the university parking lots in real-time and used Python RCNN to understand the availability of parking spaces in these satellite images.The output of the available parking spaces and the front end application were implemented using XCode.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing a CNN on a satellite image is a real challenge, as sometimes the images are not clear. We used displacement method to accurately separate the edges as to distinguish each parking space clearly in the image. Another challenge was, integrating the backend with the XCode front-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built something new and grand for our own university. This app will really help people a lot in the university. This model can be in fact used in other areas across the world where there are issues with parking. This is like solving an unique problem in the society.

What we learned

It was the first time getting our hands dirty on XCode, and also work on a real-life application to solve an interesting problem.

What's next for CometPark

CometPark for now is only for open-space parking area. In future, it can be extended to support interior parking through the use of cameras and the open space parking can be further optimized using drones. Also, CometPark has the potential to be a part of the UTD mobile ecosystem and reach every students around.

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