How to set up a parking management system with Toloka

In this article, we will look at how to set up a modern parking management system. Such a system identifies license plates of the incoming and outgoing vehicles and coordinates how and where these vehicles enter and exit a parking space. For this to work, the system needs to know how to do image segmentation and character recognition. So, let’s imagine that you need to install this type of system at your workplace or university. Below are the steps to follow.

Step 1: Data collection

The first step is to acquire the necessary data, which in this case is all images. Ready datasets can be used, but they can prove insufficient when processing regional license plates with non-Western characters, like Arabic or Cyrillic. For this reason, we’re going to collect a completely new set of images by getting our crowd performers to do a simple field task – take pictures of different cars around them.

To do this, you can quickly utilize the ready-to-use “Product photo search” template on Toloka and adapt it to collecting pictures of cars.

Make sure you explicitly lay out all of the requirements and other relevant information in the instructions. This will play a key role in obtaining a high-quality data set. As per usual, you can ensure that the quality is up to the standard by creating a simple classification project. This way, the performers will evaluate and verify each others’ work against the requirements you’ve put in place. Let’s assume you’ve done that already and now have a ready-to-go data set of, say, 1000 images.

Step 2: Object detection

The next step is license plate detection. Since the images will likely contain quite a bit of information, we need to identify specifically the license plates and disregard the rest. For this task at hand, you can use the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection network. However, bear in mind that some training will be required afterwards.

To prepare your training set, use the “Selecting a region in an image” template on Toloka to get our crowd performers to outline all of the license plates in the collected images. To check that the quality is acceptable, you can again create a binary classification project and ask Tolokers to check each others’ work. Once it’s done, you will have your own custom dataset to train a license plate detection model using YOLO’s neural network.

Step 3: Object segmentation

The next step is segmentation which implies extracting specific digits from the license plates you now have. This is another part of the project where quality is of the utmost importance. If the digits are not extracted correctly, the recognition will most likely go south as well. Fortunately, a multitude of segmentation solutions are available to help you with this. And in case you want something more specific, you can always ask the crowd to get involved here, too. This route is more manageable if your dataset isn’t very large.

The pipeline in this case will be the same as with the data collection phase from before – some performers will mark the digits contained within the license plates, and then the other performers will validate their counterparts’ work until we’re sure that everything is fine and dandy. Once you’re through with this phase, you can train the network to turn every license plate into a single line of digits that can be sent for recognition.

Step 4: Text recognition

The final phase is text recognition within the license plates. To train an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) network, you can again use Toloka to save time. To do so, you can quickly utilize the “Text recognition from an image” template available on the platform. Since this is a very common Toloka task, taking this path means falling back onto tried-and-true quality control techniques, among them golden sets and majority voting.

As you can see, there are quite a few crowdsourcing tasks in this parking management project. Toloka has a dynamic API to help you keep track of all of them. This means all of these steps can be easily automated – all you need to do is create a pipeline for your project at large that will allow the data to be transferred between your ongoing tasks. This way, you can also observe first-hand as the labeled data is coming in from Tolokers. A full pipeline for this project should look like this:

Your turn to try

That’s it! No doubt, it’s much easier than you imagined before. Now, it’s your turn to have a go. Follow these steps and also be sure to check out our new self-study guide to get even more hands-on help with our interactive video tutorials.