Provo, Utah (ABC4) — Many students may be familiar with the struggle of endlessly driving around campus parking lots and having trouble finding a spot.One of a group of innovative students brigham young university is working on resolving this issue.
These students are using an AI detection and tracking system called Spot Parking to reduce parking violations in paid parking lots. According to BYU's press releaseapproximately 51 percent of parking violations on college campuses go undetected, which can make it difficult for those who have paid for a pass to locate the parking violation.
The student team of Ryan Haggerty, Cooper Young and Dean Smith believes the technology can be extended beyond university campuses and used anywhere paid parking is available, such as airports and event venues. Said it can be used.
They took first place in 2024 BYU Student Innovator of the Year This month's (SIOY) contest gives them $12,000 to spend on their work.
“We knew spot parking had great potential, so we started looking everywhere for funding to get the idea off the ground,” Hagerty said. news release. “SIOY has had a great experience in gaining visibility and funding. We feel we can now begin parking enforcement in earnest.”
When cars enter a parking lot, Spot Parking uses cameras and AI to assign each car a unique tracking identifier tied to its license plate. Parking spaces are also displayed as occupied or empty. The data is then passed to parking enforcement through the Spot Parking app, allowing them to see which parking lots have illegally parked cars and how long they have been there.
“Being able to more consistently enforce parking regulations would reduce the frequency of people parking illegally and free up an estimated 27% more space on college campuses for those who actually paid for their passes. “It will be,” Hagerty said.
The BYU team said spot parking improves on two existing solutions. One is that vehicle-mounted license plate recognition cameras (affordable but labor-intensive) and individual parking sensors on parking spots are low-maintenance but costly.
The student team hopes that spot parking will reduce the cost of parking enforcement by 65%, a significant number since the average university spends more than $400,000 on parking enforcement each year. added.
They are also focusing on improving Spot parking's AI tracking accuracy, which they say is already at 95-97%, higher than other current methods.
In the future, the Spot Parking team is also developing a live feature that will provide drivers with real-time data about available parking spots.
