Trained a multi-spot parking occupancy detector using a DINO backbone + procedural Blender synthetic data

I built this parking lot occupancy detector to work on real-world security cameras which tend to have lower angles and lots of obstructions from other cars. I have seen other parking lot detection CV demos that use off-the-shelf object detectors (like standard YOLO bounding boxes). They would generally only work on impractical camera setups (e.g., drone shots or 200+ foot high cameras). A couple of technical takeaways from training this that might be interesting: DINO Backbone vs. Standard CNNs: I tested several backbones, but the DINO Vision Transformer performed the best by a good margin. Be