Car parking lot availability detection using the faster R-CNN method

Abstract

Parking demand continues to rise as private vehicle use increases, making timely information about available spaces essential for efficient parking management. Many existing monitoring approaches still rely on fixed slot sensors or visual detectors that report accuracy without examining how confidence settings affect the final availability decision. This work investigates Faster region-based convolutional network (Faster R-CNN) with a ResNet-50 backbone for image-based parking availability detection using a public parking-lot dataset annotated in Pascal visual object classes (VOC) format. The experiment evaluates several confidence thresholds to determine how each setting changes the balance among accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The most balanced setting was obtained at a threshold of 0.5, where the model achieved 95% accuracy and 97.3% for precision, recall, and F1-score. These results show that threshold configuration is an important factor in reducing missed detections and false alarms, although validation using real campus CCTV data and direct comparison with lightweight detectors remain necessary before practical deployment.