Abstract

Nowadays the trend in the automotive industry is to integrate systems that go beyond the scope of just maneuvering the car. Navigation, communication, and entertainment functions have become usual in most cars. The multitude of sensors present in vehicles today can be used to collect information that can be shared with other drivers in order to make the roads safer and cleaner. A more troubling issue that affects drivers is the search for free parking spots, because of the time waste, fuel consumtion and effort. There are already solutions available that try to help drivers diminish these problems, like crowdsourcing smartphone apps, but they are still far away from being a reliable solution. The overall goal of this thesis is to find new ways of providing parking information to drivers. This information is collected from vehicles which are equipped with latest sensoric hardware capable of detecting parking spaces while driving and distribute these information to the cloud, sharing it with other drivers using smartphones or vehicle's integrated displays. Though the idea is simple, there are many challanges that need to be addressed. The thesis will also look into ways of improving parking surveillance for vehicles to make them less susceptible to vandalism and thefts, by using latest vehicle-integrated video camera systems. A study will be made to see what information drivers want to have related to parking and how this information can be displayed to them. Further, a cloud based-implementation of such a system will be presented in detail and an evaluation will be made to see how the system behaves in the real world.