Upgrade surveillance with HD and analytics
30 January 2012
Video surveillance is in the midst of a paradigm shift. Gone are the days of watching fuzzy images on CCTV.
In their place, high-resolution Internet protocol (IP) cameras are improving video quality and enabling new applications like video content analysis (VCA). This shift is also driving the integration of security and surveillance into broader enterprise IT infrastructures, enabling new cost efficiencies.
However, the large installed base of analogue cameras presents a critical question: how can end-customers take advantage of digital technology while preserving their investments in analogue cameras?
The solution to this quandary lies in hybrid network video recorders (NVRs), which receive, process and record video from analogue and digital cameras. The recent introduction of the second generation Intel Core processor family provides these devices with significant new advances for accelerating video processing and VCA.
Hybrid surveillance systems, with the capability to incorporate both IP and older analogue cameras within one system, are experiencing strong adoption in the surveillance market.
Such solutions allow end-users to:
• Preserve existing investment in analogue cameras while adding IP-based performance, intelligence and manageability
• Digitise analogue camera video streams for transmission across the IP network, remote access/viewing, data storage, and VCA
• Provide a cost-effective transition path to a total IP video surveillance system as legacy equipment reaches end-of-life and is retired
One great advantage of IP video surveillance is that it provides a way for digital intelligence to replace security staff. VCA allows computer algorithms to intelligently monitor real-time video for unusual movements, crowd formation, people counting, license plate reading, left-behind objects, and much more. VCA can also be used to search recorded video for particular events.
To illustrate the advantages of a hybrid NVR, consider its utility for metropolitan police departments. As illustrated in figure 1, police departments can use hybrid NVR systems to:
• Manage and view both IP camera and digitised analogue camera feeds across the city through a Central Management System (CMS)
• Remotely view camera streams through whatever network-enabled device they’re using (even a smart phone) for more intelligent and appropriate response to incidents in progress
• Simultaneously share with emergency response personnel the same video feed for better co-ordination
• Receive email alerts on potential incidents that have been detected by VCA software
• Have cameras read license plates and report on stolen vehicles or driver identity
• Search stored video for particular incidents flagged by VCA software
While VCA brings many benefits to surveillance systems, it imposes large computational loads on the NVR. Hybrid NVRs face additional workloads due to the need to encode analogue video. Furthermore, NVRs that transmit video to networked devices must perform transcoding in order to convert high-resolution camera feeds into more network-friendly formats. Together, these workloads present a major computational burden.
The second generation Intel Core processors are ideally suited for this kind of work. The graphics and media capabilities built into these processors provide performance levels that previously required a separate graphics card. The graphics engine moves video encoding, decoding and transcoding functions usually done in software into dedicated hardware known as Intel Quick Sync Video. This hardware provides native support for all mainstream codecs and the ability to handle multiple 1080p streams simultaneously. To illustrate the advantages of this new hardware, processor power is cut in half over the previous generation for HD video playback.
Additional graphics optimisations come from the new Intel Clear Video HD Technology. This advanced video processing logic provides better performance in de-noise, de-interlace, sharpen, scaling, and colour processing operations. This suite of hardware and software technologies uses advanced video techniques to remove jitter and create crisper visuals – all the better for reading license plates or identifying a face.
To improve analytics performance, second generation Intel Core processors include the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) instruction set, an advanced form of Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel SSE). Intel AVX widens the data path from 128 bits to 256 bits and introduces other upgrades that provide up to double peak FLOPS performance compared to Intel SSE4 instructions. This performance boost is no small matter when a single NVR can have up to 32 channels of megapixel cameras feeding it video.
To enable security customers to take advantage of second generation Intel Core processor performance gains, NEXCOM has developed the NViS 6200 (figure 2). This intelligent, hybrid NVR is a 2U rackmount system designed to accept uncompressed analogue video input from older analogue cameras, as well as digital video input from IP cameras and high-resolution IP megapixel cameras.
In addition to leveraging all of Intel’s recent advancements, the NViS 6200 includes smart technology of its own. While many hybrid solutions depend on add-in cards to capture feeds from analogue cameras, the NViS 6200 includes embedded video capture chips that can handle 32 channels of video at D1 resolution (figure 3). This reduces the risk of compatibility problems with add-in cards and simplifies system design.
The NViS 6200 is also designed to take advantage of the Intel Media Software Development Kit (Intel Media SDK). This SDK provides a standard application programming interface (API) to help create high-performance video solutions. The API exposes the media acceleration capabilities of second generation Intel Core processor platforms for encoding, decoding and video pre-processing. This improves utilisation of the hardware-accelerated video codecs of these processors, thus enhancing the NViS 6200′s handling of the continual stream of video from a surveillance system’s cameras and the conversion of this video into different formats for viewing and storage.
The advantage of the NViS 6200 is that by using 2nd generation Intel Core processors, it can handle a wide range of workloads, giving system integrators much greater flexibility in camera selection and system design. The power of the system is also important in the use of NVR-based VCA to search for and retrieve video of specific events from stored video.
Another valuable feature of NEXCOM’s hybrid surveillance solution is its abundance of expansion options. Users who want to expand the system with their own devices will find 16 PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 lane slots for exceptional scalability. Furthermore, a Mini PCIe socket is available for wireless communication, which is especially useful for transmitting real-time alerts, video and images. For backing-up recorded data, NEXCOM’s NViS 6200 includes 6 Gb/s SATA 3.0 hard drive options in a variety of capacities. This enables the NViS 6200 to store massive amounts of video.
One final feature of the NViS 6200 is noteworthy from a maintenance and management point of view. Second generation Intel Core vPro processor platforms include a collection of capabilities known as Intel vPro technology. One of these capabilities, Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT), provides intelligent, hardware-assisted remote management features that can help IT departments and third-party IT providers to query, fix, update, and protect networked embedded devices, even when they’re powered off, not responding or have software issues. With Intel AMT activated, IT staff in a central location can manage a large number of NViS 6200 NVRs spread all over a site or many sites. This can significantly reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), greatly minimising the number of physical visits IT staff has to make to monitor and service equipment.
By combining legacy analogue cameras with high-definition IP cameras and VCA, hybrid surveillance systems offer a cost-effective yet high-performance solution. The NEXCOM NViS 6200 demonstrates how to realise these benefits by leveraging the second generation Intel Core processors, which offer powerful encoding and decoding accelerators, as well as signal processing features that support advanced analytics.
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