Smart cities monitoring through wireless smart cameras

Cities and urban environments nowadays suffer more and more discomfort due to several factors: the increase in the number of cars, the reduction, due to budget issues, of free parking, the economic difficulties in times of crisis that lead to a reduced efficiency of the public transport system. Beside these factors, an increased availability of computing facilities and devices bring the possibility to improve one of the most burdening aspects, that is the traffic generated by cars searching for a parking place. In this paper we present an approach based on wireless smart cameras to the monitoring of open air public parking areas. The main strengths of this solution lie in the independence and scalability of the proposed architecture. Independence is mainly based on autonomous intelligent cameras performing processing on-board; while scalability is mainly obtained through low cost single node which can be assembled in a wider sensors network and do not need high-cost requirements for installation.