NEC parking payment pilot will bill from driver exit time

NEC and UrbanChain will begin a roughly one-month NEC parking payment pilot in September at surface lots in Japan’s Fukuoka Prefecture, testing a system that starts the parking clock when a driver exits a vehicle rather than when it enters the facility. The companies have not disclosed pricing, participating lot names, performance results or a commercial launch timetable.

The planned trial combines UrbanChain’s automated-payment Parking OS, a module of its UrbanOS platform, with NEC’s AI-powered image recognition for detecting when occupants leave vehicles. NEC and UrbanChain say they began examining this service model in April and will use the Fukuoka demonstration to assess it from technical and business perspectives.

How will NEC’s parking payment pilot work?

Most parking systems begin counting time at the entrance. Under the proposed model, payment would begin at the actual time a driver exits the vehicle. The change is intended to exclude time spent looking for a space, dropping off or collecting passengers, or turning around before parking.

That billing rule depends on cameras and image-recognition software recognizing an occupant’s exit in a real operating environment. The pilot will assess the effectiveness of the exit-detection technology and its integration with Parking OS. It will also examine the number of cameras and their placement needed for deployment.

Those are tests, not established results. The companies supplied no figures for detection performance, required camera count, costs or customer savings. They also did not identify a decision date for turning the pilot into a deployed service.

Safety checks and future data services

NEC and UrbanChain say the system may add a safety function by flagging vehicles where an occupant has not been confirmed exiting for an extended period. Their announcement cites concern about drivers who experience medical emergencies while still in their cars. The trial will assess the proposed function’s benefits, rather than demonstrate that it has improved safety.

The companies will also evaluate the accuracy of occupant-exit counts for possible customer-visit analysis at commercial facilities. Longer term, they say they intend to pursue data services that use those counts and visitor-trend analysis, and to extend the approach from surface lots to mechanical parking systems in multilevel structures.

The broader proposition is modest: revise the billing trigger using computer vision, then determine whether the setup works in practice. The September pilot is designed to answer open questions around camera deployment, the exit-time payment model and the proposed safety functions.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.