What are these car park object for (pics)?

[mart]

While in a Sheffield supermarket car park recently, I was looking at the these disc shaped objects fixed in the surface. My curious mind could not work-out their purpose. Does anyone know what they are for?

 

[eSCHEn]

Just a guess but, were you waiting on the other half?



They look like retractable bollards to me.

 

[Paul.]

Wireless parking bay sensors, to detect whether the bay is occupied and for how long,

 

[gordon stephenson]

I parked in a gated multi storey park once, Each bay had a metal pad ( under engine position) It was an anti theft device that knew if your car was moved without the bay code being deactivated when paying to leave, Don't know if they are something similar.

 

[eSCHEn]

Wireless parking bay sensors, to detect whether the bay is occupied and for how long,

Winner!

http://www.parking-net.com/parking-news/nedap-identification-systems/testing-sensor

 

[skotl]

I was thinking that it might be expensive to put one of these in every space but then figured that you would get an accurate assessment of how full the carpark was, even if you only installed them in (say) 1 in 10 or 20 bays.

There would need to be some statistical analysis involved (people will want to park nearer the elevators / stairs / shops so the concentration of cars in these areas would be higher) but it wouldn't be impossible to get a reasonably accurate picture.

I bet there's a whole science to car park usage mentality

 

[skotl]

...I bet there's a whole science to car park usage mentality

Ooohhh - there is

Using video cameras to assess car parking vacancy; http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/logi...6422824/6424278/06424303.pdf?arnumber=6424303

"The accuracy was 99.9% for occupied spots and 97.9% for empty spots for this 24-hour video"

And the science bit;

The proposed solution uses trained neural networks to determine occupancy states based on visual features extracted from parking spots. This method addresses three technical problems. First, it responds to changing light intensity and non-uniformity by having adaptive reference pavement pixel value calculate the color distance between the parking spots in question and the pavement. Second, it approximates images with limited lighting to have similar feature values to images with sufficient illumination, merging the two patterns. Third, the solution separately considers nighttime vacancy detection, choosing appropriate regions to obtain reference color value.

 

[mart]

Just a guess but, were you waiting on the other half?
They look like retractable bollards to me.

No, actually I was there on my own. I `d been inside getting a few bits for dinner-a potato, one carrot and a small pork chop. The girl on the check-out said, I bet you live on your own?. I said, yes, how do you know?. She said, you’re an ugly get.

 

[eSCHEn]

No, actually I was there on my own. I `d been inside getting a few bits for dinner-a potato, one carrot and a small pork chop. The girl on the check-out said, I bet you live on your own?. I said, yes, how do you know?. She said, you’re an ugly get.

Ooooooh harsh.

Did you get her number?

 

[mart]

No, I was fine, I`m used to that sort of thing. I like women but I don`t like the build up to sex -you know, having to part with all that money.

 

[bert]

Yup look like parking sensors to me, I sell similar ones. Good ones use a magnetic field sensor and a luminesence sensor. Used for occupancy monitoring as well and can be used in a parking app to help you find a space.

 

[sardine]

Spray paint over them all and see what happens ?