Abstract

This study develops a smart system for detecting illegal parking violations in Nigeria. The system is designed to automatically detect, identify, and report parking violations using computer vision, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies. To obtain photos of the vehicles that are parked in the area where parking is prohibited, the system is equipped with an ESP32-CAM. These photos are then sent to a cloud-based Flask server, which runs a YOLOv8 model for vehicle and plate detection and Tesseract OCR for license plate recognition. The detected plates are cross-checked with a Supabase database to find vehicles that are not registered, annotated results along with the description of the violations are sent to the police (law enforcement agents) as an alert on a web dashboard in real-time. The system was evaluated with performance metrics which include accuracy, precision, and reliability under different lighting and environmental conditions. The results obtained from the evaluation process demonstrate the potential of the system to be implemented as a scalable and cost-efficient solution for urban traffic enforcement in Nigeria.

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