Occupancy Determination Method and System

A system for determining an actual occupancy distribution of one or more parking spots of a parking area, the system comprising

• a camera with a field of view for capturing images of the parking area, the images comprising representations of the parking spots;
• a processor configured to:
• process an actual image of the parking area to detect one or more vehicles in the actual image, resulting in an actual vehicle representation;
• and
• process the actual vehicle representation and an earlier generated general layout of the parking area to determine the actual occupancy distribution.

A Method for determining a general layout of a parking area comprising at least one parking spot, the method comprising:

• providing a plurality of vehicle representations VRep(c) with c=1, 2, 3, . . . wherein different vehicle representations VRep(c1), VRep(c2) with c1≠c2 of the plurality of vehicle representations VRep(c) have been determined in corresponding vehicle detection steps from different images of the parking area, wherein such different images show the parking area at different points in time;
• and
• processing the vehicle representations in a spot clustering step to determine the general layout of the parking area;
• wherein the spot clustering applies a hierarchical clustering process on the plurality of vehicle representations.