Lot Aegis

Inspiration

We have all experienced or heard of theft in supposedly secure parking lots for businesses that even have "parking tags" that only supply the illusion of our vehicle's security. We believe that the process of parking and leaving should be more streamlined and we believe that our tool will benefit customers.

What it does

Lot Aegis records the faces of those present in the vehicle and the license plate of the vehicle at the time of entering the business. When leaving, it will ensure that the driver of the vehicle is one of the previously recorded people.

How we built it

We used flutter to implement a mobile app that interacts with Firebase ML Vision for Facial Recognition and OCR for license plates.

Challenges we ran into

Packages that we intended to use conflicted with AndroidX and we had to use older versions of almost all flutter packages to circumvent this problem. The outdated version of the Firebase OCR that we used has problems picking up text most of the times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We discovered that this idea that we had was possible to organize and design a prototype for in ~40 hours We were able to familiarize ourselves with packages and frameworks that many of us didn't even know existed before we started. We experienced managing dependencies and ensuring that none of them broke each other.

What we learned

We learned that we should have a better idea of the tools that we wish to use before starting a project and to ensure that we have backup plans in case out default packages do not work. We also learned how to improvise, adapt and overcome arbitrary problems that may come up when our tools don't work as intended.

What's next for Lot Aegis

We wish to expand it to more establishments such as schools to give parents peace of mind that their child will never leave with someone suspicious, or even guard gates for apartment complexes and businesses with parking lots dedicated to employees.