In this article, a novel heterogeneous fusion of convolutional neural networks that combined an RGB camera and an active mmWave radar sensor for the smart parking meter is proposed. In general, the parking fee collector on the street outdoor surroundings by traffic flows, shadows, and reflections makes it an exceedingly tough task to identify street parking regions. The proposed heterogeneous fusion convolutional neural networks combine an active radar sensor and image input with specific geometric area, allowing them to detect the parking region against different tough conditions such as rain, fog, dust, snow, glare, and traffic flow. They use convolutional neural networks to acquire output results along with the individual training and fusion of RGB camera and mmWave radar data. To achieve real-time performance, the proposed algorithm has been implemented on a GPU-accelerated embedded platform Jetson Nano with a heterogeneous hardware acceleration methodology. The experimental results exhibit that the accuracy of the heterogeneous fusion method can reach up to 99.33% on average.
Keywords: convolutional neural networks; embedded computer; mmWave radar; parking meter.