Artificial Intelligence recognizes incorrectly parked cars and free parking spaces in Tampere

The city of Tampere is piloting IoT-TICKET Smart Parking Analytics solution in the city centre. The solution encourages reducing unnecessary driving by providing real-time information about free parking spaces. Drivers can check the number of free spaces from a web application.

The target area of the pilot is the area between Hämeenpuisto and Näsilinnankatu on Hallituskatu (marked in blue). The western part was cut off due to the road construction site. The cameras were placed in the places marked in red, so that the whole area could be covered.

Hallituskatu was chosen as the pilot’s target area, as it is one of the busiest streets in the center of Tampere. Along it, in addition to parking spaces, there are pedestrian crossings, commercial properties and, for example, an arched gateway, in front of which you are not allowed to park. Therefore, in addition to reducing car use, Tampere was also interested in taking a safety perspective:

The pilot solution recognizes parking that is blocking the use of the rescue road or disturbing the visibility to crosswalks. This kind of analytics on incorrect parking has significant impacts for city- and traffic safety in the future.

Markku Niemi, Business Tampere

The pilot is a part of the CityIoT2 program, which aims to improve how data is utilized in city environments. The solutions implemented in the program were chosen to be scalable for different cities in Finland and internationally.

“Knowledge management improves operations and helps us to allocate resources to where the biggest benefits can be gained. The pilot project that Wapice implemented helps the city planning organisation to identify the development targets and potential safety risks in Hallituskatu area. If incorrect parking is constantly occurring in the same location, it indicates that the city planning organisation should make long-term changes”, says Minna Kinnunen, the Project Manager of CityIoT 2 program.

Effortless analytics solution – scalable to all parking areas of the city

The commissioning of the solution began with common planning: where should the sensoring cameras be installed, and which kind of angles would work best. Wapice delivered the required hardware, and the installation was done by Tampereen Vera. Soon the data was available in the browser-based user interface, on Wapice IoT-TICKET platform and in the PWA-application provided for the end users.

“PWA application or progressive web application, refers to a browser-based web application that the user can attach to the home view of their mobile phone – just like with native mobile applications. PWA combines the best sides of mobile application and responsive web page, so the user can choose themselves how they wish to use the application”, says Matti Järvi, Project Manager at Wapice

IoT-TICKET Smart Parking Analytics enables sharing anonymized data for different purposes – for example, for other web- and mobile applications.

Smart City Solutions that develop based on the user feedback

IoT-TICKET Smart Parking Analytics is part of the Wapice Smart City Solutions offering, which aims to support the development of environmentally sustainable and comfortable cities by using data. Wapice has already implemented artificial intelligence-based monitoring of parking spaces in several locations, such as Oulu and the University of Oulu, Turku and Tampere.

Each use case brings something new to the application: this time we developed the recognition of incorrectly parked cars. Smart Parking Analytics contains a feedback system where users can provide their feedback and help us to further improve the solution.

Due to extensive piloting, the solution has developed into a complete product that is ready for scaling – even to all the parking areas in the city.

Jari Kuusisto