Michael Black CS190 Initial Requirements Doc ParkQuest Project Idea - The Problem -------------------------- Ever have difficulty parking in the morning around the Brown campus? No? Well that's probably because you're a student and you don't have a car. The fact is that parking near Brown on weekday mornings can be very difficult. Many times a person has to drive far away because in order find a spot that is more reliable to be available. This wastes valuable time, especially when you're running late. Not to mention the guy that's been in your favorite spot for the past 2 days, and who ought to have been towed away by now. Project Idea - The Solution -------------------------- ParkQuest hopes to alleviate this problem by allowing users to query a real time database of available parking spots. Just by entering your location, ParkQuest will be able to return to you a list of available parking spaces that are available. ParkQuest will also notify local policying authorities of cars that are parked illegally or whose times have expired. Users -------------------------- Users will be anyone who is in a rush to find a parking spot during busy times such as weekday mornings and weekend evenings. Brown Police and Security and Providece Police will also be given real time feed back as to which cars need to be towed or ticketed, thus allowing the cop that would be doing circuits checking for expired vehicles to be doing more important things, like checking out the new Krispy Kreme flavor at store24. Requirements - (the more necessary an item, the more *'s it has) --------------------------- Real Time Sensors ***** Cameras will most likely be used to monitor certain areas. Image processing techniques will need to be used to decipher the data. Professor Centintemel suggested that we contact Engineering Professor Gabriel Taubin for more information on image processing. ***** 2-5 cameras will be deployed at specific high trafficked and popular parking destinations for the purposes of developing the project for this class. ***** A central system will need to be used to gather and process the data received from these cameras. It is critical that the information from the cameras to the central system be transferred quickly to provide real time feedback to the user. Database ***** There will need to be a way for information from the cameras to be transferred, archived, updated, and retrieved. **** The database will need to keep track of users and their profiles so that a user isn't allowed to take a spot for which she/he doesn't have a specific permit. The database will also therefore need to take into account if certain parking spaces have restricted access. **** There will need to be information on the streets, their relative locations, and free and taken parking spots. User Profiles **** Users must be able to first logon and create their own profile. This would have to include parking permits they have, in order to be able to provide accurate available spots. It may also include car size to perhaps determine if their car would fit into the available space. Web Accessible ***** Users must be able to access the parking lot information from a website so that they can get current parking spaces through a cell phone with web browsing capabilities. Thus they can query the parking spaces while driving, which is really the only time it'd be useful. *** Users would ideally be able to speak their location and the name of the street they want, so voice recognition would be ideal. This may be more of a low priority spec. *** The system should be capable of supporting at least 20 users accessing data at the same time (to simulate rush parking conditions in Providence). Updateable and Administratable *** The whole system must be capable of taking on new information such as new parking lots, streets, users, restricted access, etc. *** The system must be secure and only allow the appropriate administrator to update items or tamper with controls. Notification System ** This would keep track of how long each car has been in a certain space and send notifications to the appropriate authorities if the car has been in a space too long. This would ideally free up more spaces and save man power by allowing the former parking cop to do other things. Security System ** If a car is broken into, this would also send warnings to the appropriate authorities. Things like fire, smoke, or broken glass might be detectable. However, this may require advanced image processing techniques beyond our capabilities. External Dependencies -------------------------- --> Image processing techniques will most likely be very limited and will also depend on weather conditions (rain, snow, etc). --> Image processing techniques will also depend on the quality of hardware, which leads to... --> Hardware will need to be reliable and not too expensive. It also must be able to update a central server continuously with data. --> Privacy issues with having a camera running continuously in a public area may be of concern. Divisibility ------------------------- For a group of ten people, this project could easily be divided as follows: --> 2 people: image processing --> 2 people: hardware setup and maintenance --> 2 people: database --> 2 people: user interface and query system --> 2 people: administrative features - adding new streets, security, etc. Overall Conclusion ---------------------- ParkQuest would be an excellent experience in data processing and creating a system that could be used in the real world to solve a real problem. It's infrastructure could also easily be scallable to other monitoring applications.