An Ensemble-Based Self-Taught Learning Approach for Parking Space Classification Under Limited Data

The paper proposes an ensemble-based self‑taught learning framework for parking space classification that uses unsupervised convolutional autoencoders to learn transferable visual representations from unlabeled data. These learned encoders serve as fixed feature extractors for supervised classification with limited annotated samples, and an ensemble of heterogeneous autoencoders with independent classifier heads is employed to enhance robustness and reduce architectural bias. Experiments on PKLot and CNRPark benchmarks demonstrate that this approach significantly lowers annotation requirements while achieving high accuracies (93–96%) under cross‑dataset evaluation protocols.