Outsight Successfully Obtains BASt Certification

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is BASt certification and why does it matter for parking technology vendors?

  BASt (Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen) is the German Federal Highway Research Institute, a government-backed technical body that sets standards for road transport safety and operations. Its certification is recognized internationally as a benchmark for reliability in highway-adjacent systems. For a parking technology vendor, BASt approval signals that the solution has passed documentation, performance, and robustness evaluations under real-world conditions, including adverse weather, making it credible for procurement by public road operators and highway concessionaires. Outsight obtained BASt certification for its SHIFT platform, demonstrating that its infrastructure-based LiDAR perception pipeline meets these rigorous requirements and can be specified with confidence in regulated European road and parking infrastructure projects.

• How does LiDAR handle truck parking detection compared to camera-based systems?

  Truck parking detection requires accurate classification of large vehicles at varying orientations, including longitudinal parking configurations, and reliable operation in darkness, rain, and fog. LiDAR measures the 3D geometry of each vehicle directly, capturing length, width, and position without depending on ambient light or image contrast. Camera-based systems lose accuracy at night and in poor visibility, which are precisely the conditions most common at motorway rest areas. BASt's performance tests specifically verify positioning accuracy thresholds for trucks, a requirement that passive optical sensors struggle to meet consistently. Outsight's infrastructure-based LiDAR approach, which builds a real-time 3D replica of every vehicle moving through a site, is designed around exactly these conditions, processing detections through a sub-50ms pipeline that operates independently of lighting or weather.

• What does a BASt robustness test actually involve?

  BASt robustness testing runs the system continuously in live field conditions for approximately one month, verifying that detection and reporting remain stable across temperature swings, precipitation, low-visibility events, and sustained 24/7 load. The evaluation is not a lab simulation: the system must demonstrate operational continuity against real weather and traffic patterns. Outsight completed this process to earn BASt certification, meaning its LiDAR-based detection pipeline, built on a sub-50ms real-time architecture, held up under independent government scrutiny rather than manufacturer self-certification. This distinguishes BASt approval from durability claims that are rarely validated by an independent government institute over an extended field period.

• Why is illegal shoulder and roadside parking a road safety problem that sensors can reduce?

  When legitimate truck parking areas are full, drivers park on highway shoulders or emergency lanes because no real-time availability information reaches them before they commit to an exit. Stopped vehicles on live traffic lanes significantly increase rear-impact collision risk, particularly at night. A continuous occupancy monitoring system transmits live space counts to variable-message signs and navigation services upstream, so drivers can divert to available bays before reaching full areas. Outsight's infrastructure-based approach, using 3D LiDAR sensors mounted in the environment rather than on vehicles, enables exactly this kind of real-time occupancy detection across large parking facilities. Reducing shoulder parking is one of the documented safety use cases BASt evaluates in certifying parking management solutions, a standard Outsight has now achieved.

• How does Outsight's BASt certification fit alongside its ISO 27001, SOC 2, and TISAX certifications?

  ISO 27001, SOC 2, and TISAX all address information security and data-handling practices. BASt certification is operationally distinct: it evaluates the physical performance of a sensing and detection system in the road transport domain, covering accuracy, parametric flexibility, and field robustness. The four certifications address different procurement gatekeepers. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 satisfy IT security reviewers; TISAX satisfies automotive-sector buyers (a tier Outsight also serves through deployments at BMW and Stellantis); BASt satisfies highway infrastructure operators and transport ministries. Together, the four form a compliance stack that positions Outsight's SHIFT platform across multiple buyer categories. Outsight is noted as the only company worldwide certified by BASt for native 3D sensor-based truck-parking monitoring.

• Can a LiDAR parking monitoring system distinguish between occupied spaces and spaces blocked by non-parking objects like cones or debris?

  3D LiDAR classifies objects by shape, volume, and motion state rather than simply detecting presence. A stationary cone and a parked truck have distinct 3D profiles: different heights, footprints, and bounding-box dimensions. A well-configured system uses classification rules to flag genuine parking events (a vehicle-sized object stationary beyond a minimum dwell threshold) separately from transient obstructions. Outsight's LiDAR-native perception pipeline applies exactly this logic, resolving object class from point-cloud geometry without relying on cameras or license-plate data. BASt's parametrizable test category specifically validates this flexibility across different parking configurations, which is a practical requirement for mixed-use rest areas that include loading bays, emergency areas, and standard bays, and it is one of the certification criteria Outsight successfully met.