1. A computer-implemented method for determining an estimated available parking distance for a vehicle via vehicle side detection in one or more image frames from an operational video, the operational video acquired from a fixed parking occupancy video camera comprising a field of view associated with a parking region, the method comprising: obtaining operational video from a fixed parking occupancy video camera; detecting, within a region of interest (ROI) of the one or more image frames from the operational video, a side of one or more vehicles parked in a parking region facing a traffic lane using a trained classifier that is trained to detect the side of the one or more vehicles; and determining an estimated available parking distance based on the side of the one or more vehicles that are detected and a look-up table (LUT), wherein the LUT stores various image pixel locations and their corresponding real-world coordinates of an outer boundary of the parking region.