Parking Space Occupancy Detection Reference Design

Parking Space Occupancy Detection

Use the cameras already in your car park to tell which bays are taken, with free spaces always up to date.

Use the IP cameras already in your car park to see which bays are taken. An edge box analyses every camera on site and reports each bay as occupied or free over MQTT — no video leaves the site.

Seeed LabIntermediate60minVision & Video AI

Reusable Site Templates

Car parks where cameras see the bays from above and you need to know which ones are free.

Underground garage signs

A few cameras per level; free bays are summed per level and shown on the entrance and level signs.

Mall and office car parks

Count free bays by zone and send drivers to the zones that still have space.

Reserved bays

Draw separate boxes for EV-charging or visitor bays and notify the operator when one is taken.

Mount the camera high, looking down at an angle, so no bay is fully hidden by its neighbour; draw one box per bay.

Each camera is analysed at one frame per second.

Metric	Typical	Device	Deployment Note
Multi-stream capacity	6 streams without frame drops (620 s, p50 6.5 ms)	reComputer J30 Series (J3011)	Recommended choice, covering ~150–180 bays per box
Single-stream analysis	single-frame p50 36.6 ms (17 state transitions)	reComputer RK3588 Series	Rockchip platform with headroom for scaling
Camera disconnect protection	marked "unknown" in ~10 s (0 dropped frames)	reComputer RK3576 Series	Cost-effective single-stream host with fault handling

The reComputer RK3588 Series and RK3576 Series were each measured with one stream. When adding streams, add them one at a time and check that each keeps updating. For per-device latency, fault tolerance and multi-stream benchmarks, see Engineering Wiki · Parking Space Occupancy Detection.

How to deploy

Check the setup and its product list, then follow the deployment guide.

Deployment Options

IP Cameras + Edge Box

Keep your existing cameras and add one edge box on the same network — reComputer J30 / J40 (Jetson Orin Nano / Orin NX, JetPack 6.2), reComputer RK3588 or reComputer RK3576. You also need an MQTT server to receive the bay states.

2 steps · ~60min

Open the deployment guide →

Integration Interfaces

mqtt

State of every bay on one camera (occupied / free / unknown), sent to your MQTT server each time a bay changes.

Port: 1883 · Topic: <site>/parking/<camera>/slots

http

Web page for drawing and naming the bays on each camera.

/slots/editor · Port: 8080 · Method: GET

http

Service status check.

/healthz · Port: 8099 · Method: GET