IUKL Smart Car Parking App Using Automatic License Plate Recognition and Raspberry Pi

Abstract

This Paper outlines the development of the IUKL Smart Parking mobile app developed for the Infrastructure University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Android mobile application was developed using android studio and allows users to make reservations for the IUKL campus parking facilities. Furthermore, an automatic license plate recognition algorithm was developed using a Raspberry Pi computer and tested using sample license plate images displayed on a smartphone. The license plate detection algorithm was implemented using Python as the programming language and the Python library Python-tesseract, which is an optical character recognition tool for Python. The automatic license plate recognition technique was created using this Python module. Additionally, the algorithm was tested using sample license plate images and this was accomplished using images displayed from a mobile device and yielded mainly accurate results, though not 100%. The results were displayed by emitting different LED colored lights, “Red” was emitted when a plate number was not identified, and “Green” was emitted when the plate number was identified successfully. Moreover, a database was developed using PhpMyAdmin which consists of data regarding users and parking lots. This was done to solve the issue whereby no information was recorded regarding the availability of parking spaces at the IUKL campus. This paper can also serve as a template and guide for the complete implementation of a smart parking system in a university-based environment.