iParking, NHN's parking solution affiliate, announced Monday that it has completed a pilot of its "next-generation AI unmanned street parking system," jointly pursued with Seoul's Gangnam-gu Urban Management Corporation, and has begun full-scale operation.
The pilot was launched to improve the technical limitations of the existing system installed at public street parking lots in Gangnam-gu and to verify an artificial intelligence (AI)-based unmanned street parking operation model.
Street parking lots without barriers have been considered a difficult area to automate. Beyond recognizing license plate numbers, the system must distinguish parked vehicles from passing vehicles using only cameras and determine occupancy status in real time. In fact, the corporation's existing unmanned system also had a high frequency of errors, such as mistaking passing vehicles next to parking spaces for parked vehicles, requiring staff to manually correct the resulting billing errors.
In line with the corporation's demand for improvements, iParking successfully implemented an integrated unmanned operation system in an urban setting, operating from vehicle object detection and number recognition to parking fee settlement without the intervention of on-site parking attendants. In particular, it was equipped with four core technologies to enable stable operation with no overcharging or undercharging: "Segmentation AI," which analyzes the actual outline of vehicles at the pixel level to structurally lower the possibility of false detection; "On-Device AI," which performs computation directly on a dedicated AI board inside the camera to reduce errors caused by recognition delays; "Same Vehicle Identification AI," which combines number recognition with vehicle appearance similarity analysis to enable accurate occupancy determination even in bad weather; and "Video Self-Diagnosis AI," which automatically detects video quality degradation to preempt the possibility of misrecognition.
iParking and the corporation have now entered the full-scale operation stage, applying the actual billing system. Starting with this project, iParking plans to expand the system's adoption to public parking lots and urban street parking lots nationwide. Ha Tae-nyeon, CEO of iParking, said, "The goal of this pilot was to verify a structure that maintains the reliability of operational data without administrator intervention, and we successfully demonstrated this in a congested urban setting." He added, "We will present a new standard for AI-based unmanned parking operations across both the private and public sectors."
iParking, which currently operates a total of about 10,000 parking sites nationwide, is leading innovation in the domestic parking control market, having become the first in the industry to launch its cloud-based "365Cloud" in 2024. "365Cloud," which significantly improved security and convenience compared to existing systems, recently surpassed 1,000 client companies just two years after its launch.
