
Snagging Parking Spaces with Mask R-CNN and Python - ageitgey
https://medium.com/@ageitgey/snagging-parking-spaces-with-mask-r-cnn-and-python-955f2231c400
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jedberg
This is pretty cool and a great use case for a DeepLens. Since the DeepLens
can do the inference on the machine it would save a ton of bandwidth and you
could even make it play a sound when a spot opens up, so it would work
disconnected from the internet.

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sorenjan
> With a modern GPU, we should be able to detect objects in high-res videos at
> several frames a second.

How much power does this thing use?

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monkmartinez
And which modern GPU... my 1050ti struggles with out of memory issues and
pytorch.

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bostonpete
Well a 1050 is pretty underpowered for real-time object detection...

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m0zg
For training maybe. Inference uses far less memory.

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seniorsassycat
Add all the public traffic cameras from your neighborhood to get more data.

I want to monitor the traffic cameras on my commuter bus route to see if I can
better estimates than google maps.

Now I'm interested in using the public cameras to track myself around the
city.

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mlevental
which publically available cameras are there? which city makes traffic cameras
publically available?

edit:
[https://webcams.nyctmc.org/multiview2.php](https://webcams.nyctmc.org/multiview2.php)

holy crap

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alteria
Holy crap indeed!

I wonder if London's network is public.

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esotericn
With some delay, indeed it is.

[https://www.tfljamcams.net/](https://www.tfljamcams.net/)

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kingosticks
Wow! And the delay is only a few minutes. This is awesome and also scary.

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monkmartinez
Do you live in London? It has been said, without too much digging on my part,
that London has more cameras than anywhere in the world.... (or is closely
behind Beijing).

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kingosticks
Yes. And yes, it's not news that there are loads of cameras. But the reality
of actually seeing them all there on that page like that, for all to see.
Knowing that anyone could easily watch my commute tomorrow, that's still a bit
weird. Does that make sense?

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esotericn
Sure. I mean, this is what privacy advocates bang on about all the time.

I'd guess that page is probably <5% of CCTV being recorded in London.

Hell, my car has an always-on camera.

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kingosticks
There are local Facebook groups I'm in where people ask for cam footage after
their car parked on the street gets damaged and there always seems to be at
least one video offered.

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ch
Cool. Can we add infrared detection to determine if the car is just standing
rather than parked, so you can eliminate the cases where a car is not in a
parking spot, but would appear parked to this detector?

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milad_nazari
But if stationary cars are considered as parked, what about cars that are
momentarilly stopped due to a red traffic sign?

Wouldn't it cause false positives?

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deehouie
I'm a user of Mask R-CNN. While the masks it generates are great, I find too
many false positives. So in applications like this, the alerts you get may not
be what you think. Actual available parking spot may not be there.

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ageitgey
Have you experimented with having confidence level filters on your detections
and further training the model with more data on the types of object you are
trying to detect in the environments that they appear? Depending on what you
are doing, it might just be a case where some fine-tuning of the model would
solve your accuracy problem.

Sorry if this is an obvious suggestion and you've already tried all that.

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canada_dry
I'm surprised stores that offer time-limited free parking don't utilize
something like this to identify/tag cars that park past the limit.

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esotericn
In the UK this is fairly common using number plate recognition.

On entry and exit your plates are recorded by a camera.

