Detecting an occupancy status of vehicle charging slots

• Main Authors: Petr Matousek, Pavel Vabrousek, Olga Rubesová, Jakub Tomes
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 31.07.2024
• Subjects: PHYSICS; SIGNALLING; TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS

A system 100 for detecting occupancy of parking slots 202 comprising electric charging infrastructure includes a receiving module 102 for receiving image data 110 of an environment 200 of the parking slots from sensors 206; a processing module 104 for processing the image data to determine an occupancy status of the parking slots; and a transmitting module 106 that outputs a notification 112 indicative of the occupancy status to an operator 210 of the infrastructure. The image may be processed using a trained machine learning model (300,Fig.3), e.g. a convolutional neural network or image recognition model outputting a probability that the image contains a registration plate. The occupancy status may indicate registration numbers (400,Fig.4), vehicle models or how long the vehicle has been in the parking slot. A control system for controlling electric charging infrastructure may include said system and a controller for controlling electric charging points (504,Fig.6), indicating their charging status to the operator and controlling the transmitting module to output the notification.