Parking but not forgetting with one button-click

• Main Author: Ha, Robin Zhi Wei
• Other Authors: Lai Kin Seng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48519
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Have you ever received a parking offense ticket just because you return to your car ten minutes late? Or have you become S$50.00 poorer for tearing the wrong month of the year on your parking coupon unintentionally? Even you are not a driver, I am sure you that you have heard of these heart wrenching experience from your family, friends and perhaps even from a neighbor whom you never spoke to before. This project is about solving the woes of careless drivers in the use of parking coupon. We will be looking at two specific scenarios. The first scenario is the failure of the driver to return to his vehicle before the time stipulated on his displaying coupon ends. The second scenario is the displaying of invalid parking coupon by the driver. To help drivers overcome these problems, I have developed an application called Parking Coupon Reader that will “read” the parking coupons. The application validates the coupons and alerts the driver if there are any mistakes on the coupons. The application also sets up an alarm to remind the driver when the displaying coupons are about to expire. On top of all the objectives, the application works with only a single click of a button, most of the time. The application was designed modularly on Eclipse SDK using Java. The application runs on Android OS, specifically Android smart phones with camera capability. The emphases of this project are the development of photo pre-processing and information extraction modules. Photo pre-processing module involves heavily on digital imaging processes like edge detection, template match and perspective projection distortion rectification. Information extraction module will be about the collection of information from the image using techniques similar to Optical Mark Recognition.