BluePark: tracking parking and un-parking events in indoor garages

Abstract

Finding a parking spot in a busy indoor parking lot is a daunting task. Retracing a parked vehicle can be equally frustrating. We present BluePark, a collaborative sensing mechanism using smartphone sensors to solve these problems in real-time, without any input from user. We propose a novel technique of combining accelerometer and WiFi data to detect and localize parking and un-parking events in indoor parking lot. We validate our approach at the basement parking of a popular shopping mall. The proposed method outperforms Google Activity Recognition API by 20% in detecting drive state in indoor parking lot. Our experiments show 100% precision and recall for parking and un-parking detection events at low accelerometer sampling rate of 15Hz, irrespective of phone?s position. It has a low detection latency of 20s with probability of 0.9 and good location accuracy of 10m.