Talk about the development direction of video surveillance - IP and HD

Video surveillance in the security industry is accelerating the transition from analog to digital technology, while the introduction of IP, advanced high-definition codec, and analysis technology has given this traditional industry a new look.

First, rapid market growth Video surveillance suddenly became "the fastest growing market for digital video chip providers." -- Chris Dai, president and CEO of Mobilygen, a company that provides data video chips in Santa Clara, Calif., said this shortly after his successful visit to China. Today, video surveillance applications are booming in the Chinese market at an alarming rate. According to the "China Security Market Report" issued by the Security Industry Association (SIA) last year, it is expected that China's security and protection market will soar from 6.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2005 to 18 billion U.S. dollars in 2010. This market includes fire safety monitoring and security monitoring and access control. From established companies such as Texas Instruments to emerging companies such as Stretch and Mobilygen, they all hope to firmly grasp this great opportunity. They are trying hard to promote video surveillance solutions for digital video servers, digital video recorders, and Internet protocol video cameras. Many companies directly target the emerging Chinese market.

Second, from analog to digital technology market research company MultiMediaIntelligence President Mark. Kirstein mentioned four major technical factors driving the development of the video surveillance device market: "High-performance codecs, powerful analytics, megapixel cameras, and all the underlying technologies that facilitate the migration from closed-circuit television to IP/network video surveillance. Michelle, chief analyst of In-Stat Research. Abraham said that the surveillance industry is undergoing a transformation. It is estimated that more than 90% of surveillance video cameras used today use analog technology. The analog surveillance system pulls the coaxial cable from the CCTV camera to a video recorder or hard disk drive with centralized position. It is becoming more and more common for video pictures taken to be compressed onto digital video recorders to save storage space. The use of DVS systems is also becoming increasingly popular: analog video is digitally processed, compressed, then IP-encapsulated and finally transmitted to the server. However, many people in the industry are looking forward to the digital networking of the IP network. In this system, surveillance video can be directly on the digital camera H. 264 is encoded and then transmitted over Ethernet at a lower bit rate. In-Stat's Abraham said: "This does not require pulling the coaxial line, and the network consumes less bandwidth."

Video chip vendors are competing to provide digital video surveillance solutions at all levels. Stretch claims that its new processor architecture uses an integrated FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), which offers greater flexibility and supports various compression methods and many proprietary video analytics technologies. When it comes to providing higher-quality, lower-cost video surveillance camera reference designs, the most experienced TI can be said to be the leader in this area. Mobilygen strives to promote its System-on-Chip (SoC), which has a carefully partitioned architecture, hard-wired, and built-in programmable features to enable higher image quality encoding at lower power. By integrating the FPGA into the processor, "we can add instructions based on the application we want to solve," Craig, president of Stretch. Lettel said.

With FPGAs, it is fully programmable through C code, and changes and optimizations can also be made. "The chip is said to be capable of computationally intensive video analysis using encodings such as H.264. Lyttel claims that Stretch's processor capabilities are more powerful than other programmable solutions, such as TI's DSP/ARM chipset." At the same time, "the price is relatively low, only one-fourth of other programs. He added that Stretch's C-based programming environment "makes traditional engineers feel comfortable."

Third, the overall solution is still to be improved Although emerging companies often eager to think of the prospects of the emerging market is optimistic, but there are still some uncertainties in the perfect solution. IT's Petkovic said that as TI looked around for solutions around the world last year, he realized that "most analog CCTV cameras have no clue about how to make IP cameras. We want to show our customers the various excellent images our chips provide. Pipeline function and other novelty features, but the third-party manufacturers of surveillance cameras have image quality problems, we can not overcome these problems." As a result, TI collaborated with Micron's Aptina Imaging Division to develop high-resolution IP network camera reference designs. This reference design combines TI's DaVinci digital media processor with Aptina's 5-megapixel high-resolution imaging sensor to obtain high-definition IP camera solutions that use "less than $40" in electronics costs. Kovic said.

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