[DigitalToday reporter Ho-jung Lee] NHN's parking solutions affiliate iParking has completed a pilot project of a "next-generation AI unmanned on-street parking system" promoted jointly with the Gangnam-gu Urban Management Corp in Seoul and has begun full-scale operations.

NHN said on Tuesday the pilot was 추진됐다 to improve technical limitations of the existing system installed at public on-street parking lots in Gangnam-gu and to verify an AI-based unmanned operating model. iParking applied its in-house AI system tailored to urban on-street parking environments and built an integrated unmanned operating system that carries out fee settlement without intervention by on-site parking attendants.

On-street parking lots without barriers had structural limitations. Passing vehicles next to parking spaces could be mistaken for parked vehicles, and occupancy recognition errors were frequent when vehicles entered and exited simultaneously from the front and rear. That required staff to manually adjust charges.

To address this, iParking embedded 4 core technologies in the system: segmentation AI, on-device AI, same-vehicle identification AI and video self-diagnosis AI. It analyses a vehicle's actual outline at the pixel level to reduce false detections and performs calculations directly on the camera's internal board to prevent recognition delays. It also combines number-plate recognition with vehicle appearance similarity analysis to judge occupancy accurately even in bad weather, and automatically detects video quality degradation to block misrecognition in advance.

It also supports over-the-air updates to improve maintenance efficiency and provides dedicated monitoring software that enables real-time vehicle lookup and checks on usage statistics, improving operational convenience.

iParking, which currently operates about 10,000 parking sites nationwide, secured more than 1,000 customer companies in 2 years through its cloud-based parking control system, "365Cloud", launched in 2024. The company plans to expand system adoption to public parking lots nationwide and urban on-street parking lots based on the Gangnam-gu pilot.

Ha Tae-nyeon (하태년), iParking's chief executive, said the pilot aimed to verify a structure in which the reliability of operating data is maintained without administrator intervention and proved it in a congested urban field. He said iParking would present a new standard for AI-based unmanned parking operations across both the private and public sectors.