Bluetooth Sensor Data for Parking Spot Occupancy Detection

The number of private vehicles is still increasing from year to year. In order to limit environmental damage, a proper way of dealing with this trend is the introduction of intelligent automotive infrastructure. Besides traffic management solutions, smart parking guidance systems are important for reducing unnecessary traffic. For this, a key prerequisite are sensor networks that provide information about the occupancy state of every single parking spot in the parking infrastructure of high traffic targets e.g. nearby an airport or shopping mall.

A promising approach is the use of off-the-shelf wireless chipsets for sensing purposes. The use of commodity wireless chipsets was already described in a number of recent research studies for a wide range of applications, e.g. traffic monitoring applications.

In this dataset, Bluetooth sensor data is provided for the purpose of parking spot occupancy detection. For this, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmitter receiver pair is used in a single housing on the floor in the center of a parking spot. The data files contain measurements of the Received Signal Strength (RSS), while about 850 parking maneuvers with 29 different car models took place. The data was recorded both in a parking garage as well as on an open-air parking lot.