IET Computer Vision

Research Article

Multi agent parking lots modelling for ISSN 1751-9632

Received on 23rd June 2015

anomalies detection while parking

Revised 28th October 2015
Accepted on 2nd November 2015
E-First on 8th February 2016
doi: 10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227
www.ietdl.org

Imen Masmoudi1,2 , Ali Wali1, Anis Jamoussi2, Adel M. Alimi1

1REGIM-Lab: Research Groups in Intelligent Machines, University of Sfax, National Engineering School of Sfax, BP 1173, Sfax, 3038, Tunisia
2Power's Mind: Enterprise for Video Surveillance Solutions Development, Sfax, Tunisia
E-mail: masmoudi.imene@gmail.com

Abstract: Recently crowded cities are having an increasing need for an advanced parking management system to help drivers
to locate the vacant and available parking places in real time. In this study, the authors propose a novel multi agent parking lots
management system based on vision approach to detect and localise the vacant parking places at a city level and to provide
drivers with relevant information in real time. The elaboration of a multi agent approach for parking places modelling enable the
cooperation between different agents in order to improve the results of the proposed system and to detect different cases of
anomalies and abnormal situations that can be caused by the drivers, such as the cases where parked cars affect the state of
more than one place or when a car blocks the access to parking lots.

1 Introduction
In recent years, providing drivers with the real time information
about the availability of parking lots through the parking stations or
the roads, is becoming a very crucial task. It helps to save time and
efforts and to reduce the problem of traffic congestion. The
solutions based on vision techniques present an increased interest
compared with the other sensors based systems. Hence the
necessity to elaborate a robust approach able to overcome the real
world challenges such as the variation of lighting, the weather
conditions and the inter places occlusion.
In this paper we propose an intelligent vision based approach,
exploring the already installed video surveillance cameras, to
detect and localise the vacant parking spaces in an outdoor context
and it focuses specially on the detection of anomalies of parking.
We define anomaly as a false action performed by the driver while
parking like occupying two places simultaneously or stopping in a
prohibited place. The detection of these cases ameliorates the
precision of our system and provides better performance. To
achieve this goal, we introduce a multi agent architecture and we
adapt its concepts for image processing and parking places
modelling. We are inspired by the approach proposed in [1] and we
elaborate a multi agent system based on its vision techniques.
Thus, we can benefit from the powerful architecture of the multi
agent systems and the characterisation of cooperation and
negotiation between different agents in order to provide robust
results for the parking vacancies and the detection of the cases of
anomaly while parking. This permits to assist effectively the
drivers.
Our paper is organised as follow: Section 2 presents an over
view of the existent vision based techniques for vacancies detection
as well as a review of the elaborated multi agent system for parking
management systems. Section 3 details our proposed approach
based on multi agent architecture. Section 4 is an evaluation of the
performance of our proposed system and its capacity to detect the
anomalies of parking. Finally, we conclude our work in Section 5.
2 Related work
Thanks to the rising interest in the field of private and public
security as well as the technological revolution, the video
surveillance market is growing up highly and modern cities are
almost completely covered with installed video surveillance
cameras over the roads. The video streams issued from these
cameras are recently being exploited in several fields to provide its
users with smart solutions based on video analysis and scene
understanding using computer vision techniques. Many of these
solutions are interested in the field of parking management: some
works, such as [2, 3] are dealing with the process of automated
driving and parking cars in cities, others such as [4, 5], are
interested in the parking lot structure analysis from aerial videos.
In this paper, we are focusing on the detection of vacant parking
lots in the cities while exploiting the already installed video
surveillance cameras through the roads. Several classifications of
these existent vision based solutions were proposed in the
literature. These classifications are principally performed based on
either the used vision techniques or the adapted parking model.
The authors of [6, 7] classified the existent vision based
techniques into two categories based on the used parking model.
The first category presents the parking lots as rectangular regions
and perform local treatments to decide of their states, such as [8,
9]. The second category is the car-oriented approach considering
the parking lot volume as presented in [10, 11].
Masmoudi et al. [12] proposes another classification of
approaches based on the used vision techniques. This classification
includes recognition based methods and appearance based
methods.
Several approaches were proposed in the literature proposing
event detection from the video surveillance sequences such as [13,
14]. New technique of trajectories learning and classification is
adapted in [15, 16] in order to classify and recognise one of the
already learned parking events. Masmoudi et al. [1] established an
approach based on the tracking and the real time events detection
of the vehicles in motion in order to detect the vacancies in
interaction with the extracted parking model.
The adoption of a multi agent system is becoming an important
field of interest and had shown relevant results and contributions
helping drivers to preserve their efforts and time. As presented in
our literature review, the proposed multi agent systems for parking
lots management in cities can simply inform drivers of the real
time availability of the parking lots through the town or it can also
provide several other services such as driver guidance to the
optimal parking place or the possibility of reservation.
These existent multi agent approaches are focusing on the
informative system at a city level and are trying to improve the
performances of their systems in the guidance of drivers
independently of the manner of gathering the real time information
from the parking stations. Benhassine et al. [17] simulates a multi

IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414 407

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015

Fig. 1 System overview
agent solution for three principal purposes: finding a vacant place,
guiding driver to his direction and the reservation. In this solution,
the information about the places vacancies are already provided by
the station agent. The multi agent system proposed in [18], focuses
only on the study of an on-line bipartite matching in order to allow
the agents to select the most preferred parking places according to
a set of settings. The authors in [19] presents also a multi-agent
approach for a flexible parking lot management system adapted for
huge cities. However they require that the surveillance of the
parking spaces is ensured based on wireless sensors that provide
the information to the communication system.
In this paper, we adapt the concept of multi agent architecture to
our case of video surveillance records analysis to benefit from the
powerful aspect of agent's cooperation in our case of vision
techniques in order to extract the real time information about
parking lots vacancies and to provide it for an informative system
to guide the drivers.
3 Multi agent approach for anomalies detection
In this section, we introduce a multi agent approach for vacant
parking places detection based on vision techniques able to localise
the available parking lots and to detect the anomalies caused by the
parked cars in false positions. Our approach should explore the
already installed video surveillance cameras in the cities, be
adapted to an outdoor context and should cover an important
number of parking stations and roads with their different
dispositions. To guide drivers, the real time information about
parking lots vacancies is communicated via a mobile phone
application, as detailed in [20].
To satisfy these requirements we need to propose an extensible
and distributed model for our system able to cover the treatments at
a city level. To do so, we introduce a multi-agent architecture to
explore its benefits in conjunction with the proposed image
processing approach. In Fig. 1, we present each covered parking
station with a parking-agent (PA) which is responsible for the
detection of real time information about the vacancies at its
location. This real time information is then collected into a central
server and provided to drivers via an interactive mobile phone
application. It provides for each parking station the relevant
information as well as the number of available parking places.
408
17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
3.1 System design
Fig. 2 demonstrates the architecture of our proposed multi agent
system. It presents the different types of used agents and details the
elaborated relations between them. Our architecture is based
principally on a PA which represents a parking station with its
different characteristics and is responsible for the real time state of
vacancies within this station.
As detailed in Table 1, the PA is characterised by its identifier,
the total number of configured parking lots and the real time
information about vacancies. It ensures firstly an off-line phase of
parking modelling and thereafter the configuration of a position-
agent PsAi for each parking place.
A position-agent PsAi is defined by its identifier, the contour of
its representing cube as well as its real time state of occupancy or
vacancy. To decide about its state the PsAi ensures a phase of
negotiation with its adjacent position agents to finally perform an
update of the general state on the PA.
In the On-Line phase, the PA creates a tracker-agent TA which
is presented in Table 1 by its identifier, and it is responsible for the
real time detection and tracking of all the vehicles that are in
motion in the scene. For each detected moving car, the TA creates a
corresponding vehicle-agent VAj. Based on our architecture, we
can detect and track multi vehicles simultaneously, and therefore
we can manage the state of several parking places at a time.
As pointed in Table 1, each affected Vehicle-Agent VAj is
characterised at an instant t with its identifier, its positions at the
instants t and t−1, its velocity and its bounding box. These
parameters allow us to analyse its trajectory in time in order to
detect the overlaps with the parking lots and to predict its
behaviour and events inside the parking station.
3.2 Proposed approach
3.2.1 Parking lots modelling: A multi agent based modelling is
proposed to present the different parking lots and ensure its
management. Thus, we can benefit from the already acquired
advantages of inter places occlusion handling and we propose an
advanced multi agent approach. This novel method is introduced to
better surmount the case of multi vehicle detection and to detect the
anomalies while car parking.
This phase is presented as an off-line step which can be
performed only once while installing our system. It allows the
administrator to add and configure a new parking station and to
IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
 17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 2 Multi agent architecture

define its different lots and dispositions. As shown in Fig. 3, our surfaces reduce the inter places occlusion problem and give reliable
approach is based on the extraction of an on-street surface model results for vehicle events detection.
partially inspired from the 3d model. It is based on the 3d cube At this phase, the PA configures and associates a new position-
delimiting the parking lot, but we are interested in the on-street agent PsAi for each extracted parking lot, as presented in Fig. 4.
surface presented in the figure with red colour. These on-street Each new affected PsAi should represent the corresponding parking
place and is responsible for the real time detection of its changing
state.
Table 1 Definition of the used agents Once this phase of parking modelling is finished, the PA saves
Agent Attributes Functions and this configuration of parking places and will be responsible of its
messages automatic load for the on-line phase use.
parking PId: identifier of the configure(): configure the
agent PA parking-agent position-agents 3.2.2 Parking state detection: To recognise if a parking slot is
PT: total number of create(): create the vacant or occupied, a real time phase of cooperation between
configured parking lots tracker-agent vehicle-agents and position-agents is performed. As pointed in
PV: number of vacant Fig. 4, a vehicle-agent VAj should initially determine if it is
parking lots overlapping with one or more parking lot. It emits a message to the
position PsIdi: identifier of the negotiation(): perform position-agents PsAi containing its actual position VPjt and
agent PsAi position-agent i negotiation with adjacent receives a positive answer from the PsAi that it is overlapping with.
position agents Otherwise, the vehicle is just passing through the road or the
PsCi: the contour of the 3d decision(): decide about parking station and there is no change in the parking places states.
cube representing the its own state If there is an overlap detected, so the vehicle is in motion in one
parking lot i of the parking places and the VAj proceeds to the determination of
PsSi the state of vacancy updateState(): update the the occurring car's event. An event is detected when a vehicle is
state of vacancies of the entering to a parking place or when it is leaving it. That is when the
of PsAi
PA VAj crosses the on-street surface of the parking place presented in
tracker agent TId: identifier of the tracker- track(): perform the the Fig. 3 with red colour. We can distinguish principally four
TA agent detection and tracking of states for the vehicles which are:
vehicles in motion
a) ‘Entering’: if the vehicle is entering to a parking lot.
createVehicle(): create a
vehicle-agent for each
b) ‘Leaving’: if the vehicle is leaving a parking lot.
detected car in motion c) ‘In’: if the vehicle is inside a parking lot.
vehicle agent VIdj: identifier of the detectOverlap(): detect if d) ‘Out’: if the vehicle is out of all the parking lot.
VAj vehicle-agent j it is overlapped with one
or more parking lots A temporal integration of the previously extracted positions VPjt
VPjt: the actual position of detectEvent(): recognise and VPjt−1 is performed to define these four events, as presented in
the VAj at the instant t events performed by the Table 2. The event ‘Entering’ is detected when the determined state
vehicle of the VAj to a parking space PsAi passes from the state ‘Out’ to
�� ��−�: the position of the the state ‘In’. In the same manner, the event ‘Leaving’ is detected
VAj at the instant t−1
when a vehicle passes from the state ‘In’ to the state ‘Out’.
Once the event is recognised, to make its decision, the position-
VVjt: the velocity of VAj at agent acquires the information about the vehicle's velocity from the
the instant t; attribute VVjt of the vehicle-agent VAj. It calculates the degree of
VRjt: the rectangular area occupancy Oijt of the VAj inside its volume delimited with PsCi.
surrounding the VAj at the The Oijt is determined at each instant t, as the rate of the inference
instant t. between the rectangular area VRjt limiting the vehicle with the

IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414 409

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
 17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 3 Multi agent parking model

Fig. 4 Relations between different agents

contour PsCi of the 3d cube of the position-agent representing the
Parking place. This parameter specifies precisely how much the
vehicle belongs to the volume of the corresponding place as
defined in our parking model. Hence we affect to each pixel p(x, y)
of VRjt a relative probability of being inside the volume delimited
by PsCi. This measure is represented by the minimum of distance
dxyj of this pixel to all the edges representing the PsCi.
other pixels away from the centre. Hence the more we get closer to
the centre, the more we have a higher rate.
To calculate the general degree of occupancy Oijt at an instant t,
we should precise the number of pixels Nbrin that are inside PsCi
and the number Nbrtotal of all the pixels presenting the volume of
the cube, in order to determine the percentage of interference with
the volume of PsCi.

���� = min�� � �, � , ��� . (1) Nbrin

���� = . (2)
Nbrtotal
Where cjk is the segment k of the hole contour PsCi.
As presented in Fig. 5, a pixel in the centre of VRjt will be Based on this retrieved information, each concerned position-agent
affected to the highest level of membership by comparison with the makes its own decision based on a decisional module. We opt for
the use of the decisional tree which takes the final decision by
Table 2 Temporal integration for events definition combining these parameters according to the gain in information
VPjt−1 VPjt Event Eij that presents each one. In our case of study, the decision tree can
determine if a specific vehicle occupies the parking place or not at
out out out an instant t and a decision Di is so taken. Di can take the value O if
out in entering the place is marked as occupied, and V if it is vacant.
in in in
in out leaving

410 IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015

Fig. 5 Degree of occupancy presentation
Fig. 6 Cooperation and negotiation between agents
3.3 Anomalies detection while parking
To improve the performances of our system, we propose to
introduce a new concept to detect the anomalies of vehicle parking.
We define the anomaly of parking when a car does not respect the
parking model and takes more than one parking place. This
behaviour can affect our system and disturb the efficiency of the
parking lot management system at the city level. To cope with this
problem and point these anomalies we need to elaborate a new
approach of verification able to prevent the system in case of
wrong positioning of the cars.
To achieve this goal, we opt for the exploitation of the powerful
characterisation of negotiation between the adjacent position-
agents. To improve the performances of our system, as presented in
IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 6, we propose that each position-agent PsAi detecting an
overlap with a vehicle-agent VAj should negotiate with its adjacent
position-agents PsAi−1 and PsAi+1 to verify if they are also
detecting a change of state corresponding to the same VAj. This
exchange of information helps the agent to have a perception of its
environment and to make arrangements in order to improve its
decision and consequently the final decision of our system.
According to Table 3, an anomaly of parking is detected if two
or more adjacent position-agents are decided as occupied, and this
can be explained by the fact that the vehicle is crossing more than
one place at the same time.
To solve these conflicts and to revise the number of the detected
anomalies, we propose a phase of negotiation between these agents
and we reintegrate the position VPjt of the vehicle as well as the
measurements of the degree of occupancy previously calculated to
make the final decision. Two adjacent position-agents verify the
difference between the two degrees of occupancy Oi+1,j and Oi,j. If
there is a meaningful difference between the two values, we can
directly decide of the states of the parking lots. The position-agents
having the greater occupancy rate will be affected as occupied.
Otherwise, a case of anomaly will be detected. A detailed
description of this process is explained in Table 4.
Based on this process, each position-agent is able to perceive its
environment and to decide of its own state. This allows to instantly
detect the vacant parking places as well as the occupied ones. At
this level, the position-agent detecting a new state, performs an
update of information to the PA which can have a general
perception of the parking station which is responsible of and return
its results in real time to the central information system.
Comparing with [1], our new proposed approach provides a
higher degree of intelligence in order to satisfy the needs at a city
411
 17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 7 Two samples of anomalies detection

level. The adopted multi agent architecture ensures the extensibility consequently the capacity to cover several number of parking
of the system and the possibility to add and configure a new stations, with an important number of parking lots covered
parking station whenever needed. In addition, the development of a simultaneously. Moreover the new introduced phase of negotiation
multi agent approach enables the parallelism in our treatments, and between agents as well as the anomalies detection, provide a new
aspect of intelligence to our system and ameliorates the
Table 3 Cases of anomalies detection performances.
Di−1 Di Di+1 Decision
4 Experiments
occupied occupied occupied anomaly
occupied occupied vacant anomaly In this section we present some samples of parking lots detection
occupied vacant occupied anomaly manipulated by our multi agent system implemented based on the
library Repast-hpc. We first demonstrate two cases of anomaly
occupied vacant vacant no anomaly
detection and we present also our experimental results performed
vacant occupied occupied anomaly while the released tests on video sequences from the library VIRAT
vacant occupied vacant no anomaly [21] containing different records for different parking stations
vacant vacant occupied no anomaly dispositions as explained in Table 5 with a total of 138 videos.
vacant vacant vacant no anomaly Fig. 7a presents a first sample of a detected anomaly. Our
approach is able to specify the vacant parking places marked in
green and the occupied ones marked in red colour. In addition, the
Table 4 Different cases of negotiation figure demonstrates a first case of anomaly detection where a van
Oi,j Oi+1,j VPj Occupied takes while parking the sixth place of our parking model, but it also
overlaps with the seventh parking lot next to it. In this case, a
Oi,j < α1 Oi+1,j < α1 — anomaly vehicle is taking at once more than one place and an anomaly case
α1 < Oi+1,j < α2 in PsAi anomaly is detected by these two position-agents and are marked with blue
in PsAi+1 PsSi+1 colour.
The second sample of anomaly is presented on the Fig. 7b. In
α2 < Oi+1,j — PsSi+1
this case, a passing vehicle is overlapping with two adjacent
α1 < Oi,j < α2 Oi+1,j < α1 in PsAi PsSi position-agents with low degree of occupancy. Our system is able
in PsAi+1 anomaly to detect this situation and to specify the location of Anomaly
α1 < Oi+1,j < α2 — anomaly
marked with blue colour. Several measurements of performance
where performed based on the database VIRAT in order to evaluate
α2 < Oi+1,j in PsAi anomaly our approach.
in PsAi+1 PsSi+1 As first performed tests, we opted for the measurement of the
α2 < Oi,j Oi+1,j < α1 - PsSi capacity of our system to detect the anomalies among other
situations. To do so, we selected a set of videos containing different
α1 < Oi+1,j < α2 in PsAi PsSi scenario of anomalies, as detailed in Table 5, and we aimed to
in PsAi+1 anomaly obtain the most relevant results. The values of the two rates α1 and
α2 < Oi+1,j — anomaly α2 were fixed according to a set of performed tests. Table 6 shows
the obtained results under different used rates. According to this
result, we obtain a capacity of detecting 95.3% of anomaly cases
Table 5 Data description of database VIRAT using the rates α1 and α2, respectively, as 30 and 70. These
Parking aispositions Total videos Videos with anomalies performed tests highlight the capacity of our approach to detect the
parking 1 33 15 wrong behaviour of drivers through the parking station.
The general results of our experiments are detailed in Table 7.
parking 2 46 10
In this table, we present average measurements and we compare
parking 3 16 3 the performance of our new introduced approach with the results
parking 4 29 12 obtained in approach [1], and we highlight the importance of the
parking 5 14 4 phase of anomaly detection in order to better the results. This
comparison is based on the measurements of the recall, precision,
and F-measure.
Table 6 Rates of anomalies detection These tests were performed to calculate the performances of our
(α1, α2) Accuracy, % approach and to evaluate its results in different parking station
dispositions according to the installed video surveillance camera.
(20,80) 78.6
The obtained results of our measurements show the high
(30,70) 95.3 performances of our parking lots management approach and its
(40,60) 83.9 capacity to detect and handle the anomalies caused by drivers
while parking independently of the disposition of the parking
412 IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
 17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Table 7 Tests and results comparison places. Thus, our system can perform even in large parking stations
F-measure Recall: R Precision: P with an important number of covered parking lots. In addition, the
approach [1] 0.91 0.93 0.90 multi agent architecture enables to affect a PA for each new
parking station, so we can scale to a city level.
our approach 0.93 0.95 0.92

5 Conclusions
Table 8 Performance under different lighting conditions In this paper, we introduce a new multi agent approach to ensure
FPR FNR Accuracy, % Recall, % Precision, % the management of parking spaces based on vision techniques. The
morning 0.14 0.06 90 93.7 88.2 adoption of this approach provides, apart from the information
midday 0.11 0.05 91.6 94.7 90 about vacancies, the possibility to detect and report the existence of
afternoon 0.12 0,06 90.5 93.8 86.7
anomalies caused by the drivers while parking. This was possible
thanks to the relations of cooperation established between the
agents of our system at a parking level. The obtained results are
satisfying and allow to benefit from an efficient parking lots
Table 9 Performance under different weather conditions management system extended at a city level.
FPR FNR Accuracy, % Recall, % Precision, %
sunny 0.1 0.14 91.2 92.2 94.3
6 Acknowledgments
cloudy 0.16 0,2 90.4 93.4 94.6
rainy 0.12 0.06 91.1 93.3 92.1 The authors acknowledge the financial support of this work by
grants from General Direction of Scientific Research (DGRST),
Tunisia, under the ARUB program.
The research and innovation are performed in the framework of
a thesis MOBIDOC financed by the EU under the program PASRI.

Fig. 8 Tests for execution time
places. Our approach was also tested under different luminance
conditions. For these tests we rely on our own database of video
surveillance sequences recorded for a week. We consider videos
presenting different light variations along the days, and we precise
three main time slots during the day: early morning, midday and
afternoon. Table 8 presents the measurement corresponding to each
interval separately and demonstrates that our system performs well
independently of the luminance variation. This evaluation
considers also the measurements of the false positive rate (FPR),
the false negative rate (FNR) and the accuracy.
Other measurements were performed in order to evaluate the
performance of our system under different weather conditions.
Table 9 details the obtained results and demonstrates that different
weather conditions do not degrade the performance of our
approach.
Furthermore, the adapted architecture of multi agents system
presents an important asset to elaborate an extensible parking lots
management system able to cover simultaneously a multitude of
parking stations and a high number of parking places. Several tests
were performed to inspect the scalability of our system face to a
growing number of parking places treated by a single PA. The
measurements presented in Fig. 8 were taken with a machine
having the following characteristics: Ubuntu 12.04, processor Intel
Core i5 and memory 1.2 Gb.
These tests present the evolution of the needed execution time
in ms according to the evolution of the number of moving vehicles
simultaneously as well as the number of the treated parking lots in
the stations. We also compare the results obtained by our proposed
MA approach with the results obtained by the approach [1]. For
example, to cover a parking station having 60 parking places, with
five vehicles moving simultaneously, the first approach takes 284
ms while our approach reduces this measure to 51 ms. According
to this result, the adoption of the multi agents architecture enables
to provide reliable performances while reducing significantly the
needed time, even with a high number of vehicles and parking
IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
7 References
[1] Masmoudi, I., Wali, A., Jamoussi, A., et al.: ‘Parking spaces modelling for
inter spaces occlusion handling’. 22nd Int. Conf. in Central Europe on
Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision, Plzen, Czech
Republic, June 2014, pp. 119–124
[2] Grimmett, H., Buerki, M., Paz, L., et al.: ‘Integrating Metric and Semantic
Maps for Vision-Only Automated Parking’. Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Seattle, WA, USA, May 2015
[3] Furgale, P., Schwesinger, U., Rufli, M., et al.: ‘Toward automated driving in
cities using close-to-market sensors: An overview of the v-charge project’.
2013 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symp. (IV), June 2013, pp. 809–816
[4] Seo, Y.-W., Urmson, C.: ‘A hierarchical image analysis for extracting parking
lot structures from aerial images’. Technical Report CMU-RI-TR-09–03,
Robotics Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, 2009
[5] Walha, A., Wali, A., Alimi, A.: ‘Video stabilization with moving object
detecting and tracking for aerial video surveillance’, Multimedia Tools Appl.
2015, 74, (17), pp. 6745–6767
[6] Wu, Q., Huang, C., yu Wang, S., et al.: ‘Robust parking space detection
considering inter-space correlation’. IEEE Int. Conf. on Multimedia and
Expo, July 2007, pp. 659–662
[7] Huang, C.-C., Tai, Y.-S., Wang, S.-J.: ‘Vacant parking space detection based
on plane-based bayesian hierarchical framework’, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst.
Video Technol., 2013, 23, pp. 1598–1610
[8] Fusek, R., Sojka, E.K.M., Surkala, M.: ‘Energy based descriptors and their
application for car detection’. 9th Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, Theory and
Applications, January 2014, vol. 1, pp. 492–499
[9] Tschentscher, M., Neuhausen, M., Koch, C., et al.: ‘Comparing image
features and machine learning algorithms for real-time parking space
classification’, Comput. Civ. Eng., 2013, pp. 363–370
[10] Delibaltov, D., Wu, W., Loce, R.P., et al.: ‘Parking lot occupancy
determination from lamp post camera images’. IEEE Intelligent
Transportation Systems Conf., 2013
[11] Tomas, F.: ‘Parking lot occupancy detection using computational fluid
dynamics’. Proceedings of the 8th Int. Conf. on Computer Recognition
Systems CORES, 2013, vol. 226, pp. 733–742
[12] Masmoudi, I, Wali, A., Jamoussi, A., et al.: ‘Vision based system for vacant
parking lot detection: Vpld’. 9th Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, Theory and
Applications, January 2014, vol. 2, pp. 526–533
[13] Aribi, Y., Wali, A., Alimi, A.: ‘An intelligent system for video events
detection’. 9th Int. Conf. on Information Assurance and Security, 2013, pp.
108–113
[14] Wali, A., Ben Aoun, N., Karray, H., et al.: ‘A new system for event detection
from video surveillance sequences’. 12th Int. Conf. Advanced Concepts for
Intelligent Vision Systems. 2010, p. 110–120
[15] Liu, H., Sun, M.-T., Wu, R.-C., et al.: ‘Automatic video activity detection
using compressed domain motion trajectories for h.264 videos’, J. Vis.
Commun. Image Represent., 2011, 22, (5), pp. 432–439
[16] Ng, L.L., Chua, H.S.: ‘Vision-based activities recognition by trajectory
analysis for parking lot surveillance’. 2012 IEEE Int. Conf. on Circuits and
Systems (ICCAS), 2012, pp. 137–142
[17] Benhassine, S., Harizi, R., Mraihi, R.: ‘Intelligent parking management
system by multi-agent approach: The case of urban area of tunis’. 2014 Int.
Conf. on Advanced Logistics and Transport (ICALT), May 2014, pp. 65–71
[18] Meir, R., Chen, Y., Feldman, M.: ‘Efficient parking allocation as online
bipartite matching with posted prices’. In Proc. of the 2013 Int. Conf. on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems AAMAS 13, pp. 303–310
[19] Bilal, M., Persson, C., Ramparany, F., et al.: ‘Multi-agent based governance
model for machine-to-machine networks in a smart parking management
413
 17519640, 2016, 5, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-cvi.2015.0227, Wiley Online Library on [24/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
system’. 2012 IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications (ICC), June 2012, pp.
6468–6472
[20] Masmoudi, I., Wali, A., Jamoussi, A., et al.: ‘Architecture of Parking Lots
Management System for Drivers’ Guidance’. IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics, October 2015, pp. 2974–2978
[21] Oh, S., Hoogs, A., Perera, A., et al.: ‘A large-scale benchmark dataset for
event recognition in surveillance video’. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, 2011

414 IET Comput. Vis., 2016, Vol. 10 Iss. 5, pp. 407-414

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015