Potentiate Social Inclusion through Detecting Illegal Parking in Places for Disabled People

This article describes how social responsibility and social inclusion are matters that are on the agenda world-wide. Social exclusion exists at various levels and in this article, the authors address the illegal parking at places reserved for disabled people. They developed a prototype that allows, through a backend, a camera and a smartphone, to geo-reference parking spaces for disabled people in an entity (such as a school, shopping mall or any parking lot) and be advised when someone parks in that place and did not have a parking license. This required the development of a backend and a system that allows it to notify the appropriate responder whenever an illegal parking takes place. To detect parked cars, the authors use an IP Camera that captures photos every 3 minutes and send it to a cron job to be processed with the OpenALPR API that can recognize Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss, and French license plates. From this present framework, all tests allowed the authors to conclude the best location for cameras and the adjustments that were needed to avoid false positives.