Spot On Security

The latest buzz growing in the video surveillance world is storage in the camera. But storage, in this case, doesn’t always mean storage.

IMS Research placed storage in the camera at #2 of the biggest trends for 2010:

http://www.imsresearch.com/press_release_details.html&press_id=1224

Here’s a link on a recent review at the latest industry trade show in Las Vegas, last month:

http://www.experteditorial.net/securitysquared/2010/04/when-inteligence-moves-to-the-edge-1.html

As you can see, there is a lot of talk about storing video in the camera as a growing trend, and many of the leading companies are getting on the bandwagon. But what isn’t being said is that in almost all these cases, what they are talking about is not the ability to store enough video in your cameras to replace the DVR or NVR in your system.

What they are talking about is simply buffering the video storage. That means storing just a little bit of video, such as hours worth or sometimes a few days worth of video.

Anyone playing video from the Internet uses video buffering. That’s why it says “loading”, since it is creating a buffer in your PC, so that it can play the video smoothly without interruptions. That’s a buffer, not long term storage. You can’t go back the next day to find the video file on your PC, because it is erased. This is the difference between storage and buffering.

There are two main benefits for buffering video in surveillance: First, if your network goes down for a few minutes or a few hours, you don’t lose the video from your cameras. As long as you don’t wait too long, you can go back to that buffered video to see what happened during the network downtime.

Second, when transmitting video through networks, there can be short interruptions or delays. This is especially notorious with wireless networks and the Internet, which is the same reason video streams are buffered from the Internet. Buffering the video helps a lot in overcoming these kinds of issues.

But this is completely different from true storage in the camera, where you can get months or even up to a year’s worth of video storage right in the camera.

I hear strong interest for storage in the camera, since it eliminates the need for an external DVR or NVR, and it also reduces 99% of the bandwidth used by IP cameras, since most of the bandwidth is used while streaming video across the network for storage. Only about 1% of security video is actually used, so that means 99% of the bandwidth is wasted.

There are also in many cases significant storage cost savings, when it is built into the camera.

To get this kind of storage, we at VideoIQ include a full hard drive in the camera. That gives enough for months worth of continuous video storage. In fact, we now have models with up to a year’s worth of storage.

However, I rarely hear much excitement over buffering video. Most integrators realize that losing video during network down-times is a problem, but few want to pay the extra money for this, since it rarely occurs.

So, it looks to me as if most of these companies are jumping onto a bandwagon without realizing what they are jumping onto.

There is one application where cameras with a little bit of recording can make use of the storage in the camera: For applications where the camera is not recording continuously, but only with motion detection or some other kind of detected event. If events are rare, you can get by with a little bit of storage.

But the problem is that motion detection rarely works outdoors, since it cannot distinguish all the pixel changes occurring from changes in the light, trees blowing in the wind, etc., that are happening all the time. So, it will end up recording most of the time, which means you need a lot of storage. That’s why video analytics are needed – they can recognize what a person looks like, for example, and ignore all the kinds of pixel changes and movement in the scene.

One last thing worth mentioning on this subject that is rarely mentioned: Most of these companies selling cameras with what they call storage have no easy way of getting the video off the cameras. In some cases, if you want to retrieve the video, you need to go around to all of the cameras and manually collect the SD cards. Who would ever use such a system?

Frankly, I don’t think anyone is using such systems, but they are being advertised as storage in the camera.

There are a few companies who have software that enables you to access that buffered video, but there hasn’t been support for this with the large Video Management System companies (VMS). So, in large camera systems, where a VMS is usually a requirement, you are up a creek without a paddle, since there is no way to use that software to access the stored video.

Fortunately, this is changing rapidly. Genetec just announced a new update to their software that includes edge storage support. Milestone is going to be releasing something soon. OnSSI is also close.

One company not mentioned in the above video, but who is clearly way ahead of all the other VMS companies in this category is IP Vision Software. They’ve designed a system that was designed from top to bottom for distributed storage. So, they have full integration of storage in the camera capability. They are definitely worth checking out.

So, when is storage in a camera not storage?

First, when it is only buffer storage, for a few hours or days worth of video. It may help cover network failures, but it won’t replace the need for an NVR if you want continuous recording.

Second, when you have no easy way of accessing the video. It should be just as easy to playback video in the camera as it is from your NVR or DVR. It should be no different.

We put on the first demonstration of true megapixel analytics in the industry at our ISC West booth last week.

It was eye-catching. Lots of people stood there staring at the analytics detecting people, cars, trucks, motorcycles, sailboats, speedboats, etc. Here’s a picture:

Unfortunately, this blog can’t show the full resolution or video, which you really need to see to appreciate how incredible it looks.

When I say this is the first public display of “true megapixel analytics” I mean the resolution being analyzed is megapixel. There have been cameras with megapixel video that have had analytics processing before. CoVi is a good example, may they rest in peace. They sold a 1 MP camera that ran ObjectVideo analytics. However, the resolution of the analytics was only CIF (320 x 240 pixels), which gave hardly any detection range. It was silly to put CIF analytics on a megapixel camera.

Why hasn’t anyone ever demonstrated megapixel analytics before? Because of the sheer processing power that other technologies need to do this.

VideoIQ’s technology is different. We need about 1/8th the amount of processing power compared to other high quality analytics systems. So, we can run the whole thing in one of the popular low cost DSP processors. But all other analytics technologies need a lot more horsepower.

For example, ObjectVideo on their web site claims they can run up to 4CIF resolution video in the same DSP chip we are using. However, in most cases the users of OV onboard are only running CIF resolution, because there are serious limitations running 4CIF, such as only being able to have one rule running at a time and a limited number of objects that can be detected.

IOimage uses two DSP processors in their cameras to get high quality and avoid compromising detection.

The camera we demonstrated was a 1080p camera, which is 1920 x 1080 pixels. We demonstrated it live at the show, with the analytics all running in the camera. It provides 3X the horizontal coverage of a standard resolution camera, and more than 2X the anaytics detection distance.

For other technologies to run 1080p analytics, they would need more than 6 times as much processing power, compared to 4CIF video. That would mean 6 DSP chips, or some very expensive high end DSP chips.

If you try to run this on a server or a PC, you would need a full dual core processor to run one camera. So, you can see why it’s never been shown before. It is impractical for other technologies.

The other industry first we showed is something we call IQTrack. It uses the video analytics to automatically track and zoom on objects in the field of view. Here’s a picture:

This is different from PTZ camera tracking. If you look at the lower left of the picture, you will see that the whole field of view is still being recorded and it shows where in the scene you are zoomed into. So, you can always go back later and pick another part of the video to look into.

The other unique thing is, if many people are in the area, you can click on one person and it will zoom in on and track just that one person. That’s never been shown before either.

Watching it, you can immediately see that there is no comparison between watching video that is automatically zooming and tracking on important objects, versus static video cameras. It pulls your eyes to exactly what is important. I think this is going to be very popular for megapixel cameras.

The 1080p cameras we sold will also be the first cameras to ship with a new imager from Sony that has some amazing low light performance. We are still testing it, but it looks to be 2X-4X better than any other multi-megapixel imagers used in the security industry.

And of course, the camera we showed included a hard drive so that you can store 1-2 months of high quality 1080p video. This solves the bandwidth problem for megapixel cameras, since it needs no bandwidth to record, and eliminates the need for external storage in most cases.

Now that true megapixel analytics have arrived, I think it is going to set the standard, and I think it offers incredible visual value to megapixel cameras, even if you don’t want the analytics for detecting alarms.