Documenting London’s boroughs to solve parking problem

Author:Penny Boviatsou

Spending hours looking for parking space on busy city roads and parking lots is a serious matter. Cities across the world keep struggling with the problem with wasted fuel, and emissions adding up to the economic and non-economic impact of parking hunting.

Parking app technology is on the rise offering users cashless payments and helping drivers find and reserve parking spaces and avoid parking tickets.

托运, a London-based kerbside management and mobility technology firm, operates anaward-winning parking appthat allows users to see and understand all on-street parking areas, restrictions and operating hours in addition to off-street car parks, helping users make informed choices about where to park before they arrive.

“我们的任务是通过提供最佳的路边停车信息来使驾驶员的停车位忘记，以便他们可以找到最接近和最便宜的选择。我们还与地方当局紧密合作，以帮助他们通过数据驱动的解决方案更好地管理其Kerbside资产，以提高驾驶员和企业的合规性和安全访问权限，”said Dan Hubert, CEO and founder of AppyParking.

托运needed to survey London’s kerbsides tocreate an accurate map of all parking zonesacross the capital. The parking company approachedGetmapping Plc是航空摄影，移动映射，激光雷达，数字地图和基于Web的服务的领先提供商，旨在对伦敦的停车场进行移动地图调查。

With more than 20 years of experience in capturing and processing large volumes of geospatial data, Getmapping invested in twoLeica Pegasus:Two Ultimatemobile mapping systems to survey London’s boroughs for欧洲最大的移动映射项目。

Efficient data capture through mobile mapping

Project planning was crucial for the project’s success. Getmapping wanted to ensure the project would run smoothly according to a plan. The initial捕获六个伦敦自治市镇的停车数据was required in autumn 2017/18 with progressing phases through the first six months of 2018.

A team of three surveyors drove25 kilometres per daywith the Leica Pegasus:Two around London’s boroughs to simultaneouslycollect imagery and LiDAR data。在整个冬季，可以进行测量，这是可能的，并且在道路上不需要测量师或交通管理人员 - 所有数据都是从车辆的安全性中捕获的。

Once the data collection was completed, data was transferred back to the office in hard disks. Two team members processed the data using theLeica Pegasus:Managerto produce the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) corrected trajectory, along with panoramic imagery and coloured point clouds.

“The progress of surveying methods and mobile mapping systems opens new perspectives for the collection of road data. With the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate we were able to smoothly collect data, travelling around the survey sites around London, with no traffic management or road closures required,”GetMaping集团创新总监Martin Tocher说。

More data, faster

The capture of parking data in further13 London boroughs立即开始，并于2018年中期完成。

Getmapping purchased one Pegasus:Two Ultimate mobile mapping system and upgraded the existing Pegasus:Two to the Ultimate version to complete this project. The Pegasus:Two Ultimate allows capture in a variety of lighting conditions and vehicle speeds - a higher dynamic range is enabled by a large sensor to pixel ratio and a dual-light sensor. Photogrammetry and image quality are improved with the increased side camera resolution of 12 megapixels and onboard JPEG compression.

“ Leica Pegasus：两个Utlimate的高分辨率相机系统提供了更好的图像质量，以及双鱼眼相机系统提供了“免费缝制””pictures,” said Alexandre Alves, European operations manager at Getmapping.“By utilising Leica Geosystems’ latest mobile mapping technology, which has three times the resolution compared to a standard system, the volume of data handled by Getmapping increased threefold, and we upscaled our processing resources to handle the huge volume of data that phase two required.”

After100 days of surveying, the results of the two phases were:

• Surveys of allparking zones across 19 London boroughsand five cities
• 多于6,500-line km capturedin city environments with multiple passes to avoid data occlusions
• 1 million points of datacaptured per second
• 19 terabytes of raw data collected
• 52 terabytes of data delivered
• 27 features extracted per controlled parking zone
• Final relative accuracy better than1.5 centimetres
• Final absoluteaccuracy better than 4 cm
• Maximised value – mobile mappingreduces the average survey time乘以80％compared to traditional survey methods.

The captured imagery and point cloud data, along with associated feature extractions, enables AppyParking to deliverhigh definition traffic management datato their smart parking systems. Getmapping’s mobile mapping team delivered the final data ahead of time and also surveyed Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford, Portsmouth and Coventry to support AppyParking’s smart parking proposition. The customer’s expectation is to survey now cities around Europe.