Spot-Wise Smart Parking: An Edge-Enabled Architecture with YOLOv11 and Digital Twin Integration
This incremental improvement enables precise spot-level monitoring for smart city parking systems, addressing urban congestion and user search time.
The paper tackles the limitation of region-based parking monitoring by developing a spot-wise system using distance-aware matching with spatial tolerance and Adaptive Bounding Box Partitioning, achieving 98.80% accuracy with 8-second inference on edge devices.
Smart parking systems help reduce congestion and minimize users' search time, thereby contributing to smart city adoption and enhancing urban mobility. In previous works, we presented a system developed on a university campus to monitor parking availability by estimating the number of free spaces from vehicle counts within a region of interest. Although this approach achieved good accuracy, it restricted the system's ability to provide spot-level insights and support more advanced applications. To overcome this limitation, we extend the system with a spot-wise monitoring strategy based on a distance-aware matching method with spatial tolerance, enhanced through an Adaptive Bounding Box Partitioning method for challenging spaces. The proposed approach achieves a balanced accuracy of 98.80% while maintaining an inference time of 8 seconds on a resource-constrained edge device, enhancing the capabilities of YOLOv11m, a model that has a size of 40.5 MB. In addition, two new components were introduced: (i) a Digital Shadow that visually represents parking lot entities as a base to evolve to a full Digital Twin, and (ii) an application support server based on a repurposed TV box. The latter not only enables scalable communication among cloud services, the parking totem, and a bot that provides detailed spot occupancy statistics, but also promotes hardware reuse as a step towards greater sustainability.