The Municipality of Catania in Sicily is one of Italy’s largest and most complex urban areas. The city of Catania and surrounds have a population of more than one million. As the seventh-most-populated metropolitan city in Italy, Catania seeks to preserve its historic and architectural heritage while modernising urban services.
Catania leadership understood that ‘smart city’ technologies could improve efficiency, sustainability, and quality-of-life while enabling more data-driven decision making. The local administration turned to Hanwha Vision cameras and Park Smart software as an intelligent parking and an urban monitoring system in the historic city centre. This provides the city with video analytics and data insights, while citizens receive digital services such as real-time parking availability.
For years, the concept of a smart city had been discussed by the municipality. The need for intelligent parking and urban management within the city centre allowed a test of video analytics and smart parking software in a controlled setting before a roll out city-wide.
Real-time traffic and parking management
The combination of Hanwha Vision A-Series cameras with Park Smart provides a connected, AI-powered parking monitoring system that enables real-time visibility of available on-street parking while supporting urban monitoring and regulatory enforcement. This has reduced congestion and improved traffic flow, boosted the citizen experience, and increased road safety, the installers say.
About 100 cameras are installed at strategic locations where parking demand is highest. Special consideration was given to aesthetics and heritage preservation: the selected cameras blend into the city’s Baroque architecture and were approved by the Superintendency for Cultural Heritage for installation on historic poles.
The edge AI cameras carry out analytics within the devices, improving time-to-insight and eliminating the need for servers. They monitor time-based and pay-per-use parking spaces, detecting availability and transmitting data in real time to a central dashboard. From there, information is shared with a mobile application and in-vehicle displays, allowing drivers to locate the nearest available space.
For city administrators, the system provides statistical insights into parking occupancy, turnover, and demand patterns. The data can support more informed urban planning decisions and enable the municipality to refine policies based on real-world usage.
Plans
Beyond parking management, the administration expects to use AI-powered video analytics to detect unsafe driving, for example, a motorcyclist not wearing a helmet, and vehicles circulating despite being impounded. The city has plans to add to the ‘smart city’ solution to include traffic flow analysis, extreme weather monitoring and roadside waste detection.
A spokesperson at the municipality said: “This is a true smart city infrastructure in which we can provide significant services to our citizens, starting with intelligent parking and extending to broader urban monitoring and governance capabilities. Hanwha Vision’s solution gives us a secure, reliable, AI-powered video solution that transforms how we manage the city in real time.”
