Computer Vision in Parking Lots

Many parking lots have to hire people to track payment (or make sure that parkers are customers). These sorts of problems are a ripe area for computer vision algorithms because, while a computer may not be able to tell you what type of car is there, it can certainly tell you if there is a car in a given spot or not. And, further aiding adoption, in many parking lots there are already surveillance cameras installed.

For example, if a car is parked for 10 hours in a large store's parking lot -- the program could highlight it for a once-a-day check. Currently, there is no good way to get this information without continuous human monitoring of a parking lot.

Similarly, in other situations, the same information could be used to assign each new car a slot.. rather than having each car drive around looking for a spot (parking garages can get very jammed up)