ISP promotes chip reform and helps security HD

The construction of "Safe City" has been going on for nearly eight years, starting with the 21 pilot cities in 2004 and the 3111 project in 2005. Through large-scale alarm and monitoring system construction at the provincial, municipal and county levels, China's "Safe City" has now entered a period of intensive and second-phase construction. It is estimated that under the 12th Five-Year Plan, the market size will still be nearly 10 billion yuan in the next few years, and the derived business opportunities are huge.

The "Safe City" project has typical characteristics in the field of security, such as a wide area involved, a large number of sites, a large flow of people, and multiple aspects such as disaster prevention and public security. It includes monitoring of key enterprises and institutions, community monitoring, Internet cafe/hotel industry monitoring, dangerous/polluting industry monitoring, red light electronic police, city entry and exit checkpoint monitoring, and public road/public security venue monitoring. It monitors the entire city as a whole, and the images of each site will involve multiple systems and departments; in the control center, real-time video is needed as the first-hand reference material for traffic security, social security, disaster prevention, etc.

Therefore, the "Safe City" project's requirement for monitoring systems is no longer just to "see", but to "see clearly". The picture clarity that the standard definition system can provide has become a bottleneck for system upgrades, especially for smart traffic electronic police, illegal vehicle tracking and license plate recognition, which require the front-end real-time image to be high-definition, otherwise intelligent analysis will be impossible.

In recent years, compared with the stagnant state of the mature CCD, CMOS sensors have gradually opened up the market that was once dominated by CCD with the development of technology. However, compared with CCD, the current CMOS technology still has the disadvantages of low sensitivity and high signal-to-noise ratio. At this time, ISP, an important matching component in CMOS and CCD cameras, has been developing more applications due to the large-scale shipment of CMOS to make up for the shortcomings of CMOS in low sensitivity and high signal-to-noise ratio. As people pay more attention to image quality, ISP has been increasingly valued by chip manufacturers and camera manufacturers. The emphasis on high definition has also triggered the market's extraction of chips.

ISP is widely used

ISP is actually an image signal processor, which is included in mobile phone lenses, camera lenses and surveillance lenses. In terms of image quality alone, ISP itself is a component for image processing, and combined with image noise reduction technology, a satisfactory result may be achieved.

As we all know, in the early years, there was a dispute between ASIC and DSP in the chip market. Now, many chip companies have developed a more integrated system-on-chip (SoC) based on ASIC or DSP, which is more suitable for video surveillance needs. SoC integrates processor resources, memory resources, encoding and decoding algorithms, peripheral device interfaces, etc. on a single platform, solidifies most functions, and modularizes special function requirements. It is provided to manufacturers in the form of source code. Manufacturers can conduct secondary development according to different application requirements. At the same time, video coprocessors and other video subsystems can be added to enhance video image processing capabilities. It combines the advantages of ASIC and DSP to help terminal product customers simplify system design. Regardless of the chip solution selected, it can be seen that most mainstream chips have integrated ISP functions.

ISP promotes chip reform while supporting the development of high-definition surveillance applications

In the process of promoting high-definition surveillance products, the innovation of ISP technology has played a huge role. It covers technologies such as gain control, white balance, noise control, and exposure control. ISP has gradually evolved from an auxiliary technology for high-definition cameras to a key core technology. In addition, in order to meet the needs of alternative high-definition surveillance, some manufacturers have replaced CCD sensors with CMOS; while further improving the image quality, ISP is built into CMOS, which not only reduces the internal space but also reduces power consumption. This technology is currently popular in mobile multimedia devices.

As a non-mobile video device, it is not impossible for the sensor to have a built-in image signal processor. The image quality is further improved through the integration of modules, and it has perfect performance in exposure, automatic white balance and color saturation. For night vision monitoring, low illumination environment is a major drawback of night monitoring. This technology also has a good performance in near-infrared response.

New technologies are bound to face challenges in market applications. The ISP solution built into CMOS sensors can only complete some less complex algorithms, such as small mobile multimedia devices such as mobile phones. As the requirements for intelligence continue to increase, video surveillance systems have more requirements for image processing, and their algorithms are bound to become more complex, which requires chips to provide stronger power, which is also an important part of the future technology upgrade of core components of high-definition surveillance cameras. At present, there are many solutions for integrating ISP. After the chip integrates ISP, the requirements for the R&D level of security manufacturers are reduced, and the system cost is reduced at the same time. With the continuous strengthening of the ISP function integrated in the chip, it can meet the application requirements of most occasions. However, for security manufacturers seeking high-end differentiated development, the ISP integrated on the current market SoC cannot meet all their needs.

However, the advantages of ISP in future HD surveillance equipment will not diminish. Whether it is for analog HD or digital network HD, or in complex intelligent HD applications, ISP technology can provide high-definition video image quality.

Increasing demand for high-definition chips affects the future direction of surveillance equipment chips

All manufacturers are pursuing the improvement of product integration. Existing chips can realize 4-channel 1080p HD code streams, and multi-channel HD has become a trend in chip development; in addition, integrating more components on the chip is also a trend. SoCFPGA design has attracted people's attention. SoCFPGA is a SoC chip that integrates FPGA, physical processor and other hardware IP components. Driven by market demand, technology maturity and commercial competition, many manufacturers will have great achievements in SoCFPGA design in the foreseeable future.

Another direction that is being pursued is intelligent analysis. In addition to TI and HiSilicon, ADI, as a veteran chip manufacturer, has currently launched the Blackfin BF60x processor series for security monitoring systems. According to Zhang Tiehu, the Asia-Pacific marketing manager of ADI processors and digital signal processors, one of its highlights is the pipeline vision processor PVP. PVP belongs to the category of high-performance video analysis accelerators, providing 12 high-performance, flexibly configured signal processing modules (convolution, scaling, arithmetic, etc.), supporting various commonly used algorithms, such as Sobel, Canny, Laplace, threshold, histogram, integration, which can be used to accelerate up to five parallel image algorithms, thereby achieving object tracking, detection and recognition performance to meet the security industry's demand for intelligent analysis and recognition.

Cloud security is the market trend, and chip manufacturers should also provide more efficient image encoding and decoding capabilities to reduce the load of cloud servers according to market demand. In addition, chip manufacturers are also considering providing faster video image encoding and decoding technology to reduce the load of servers. High integration and high load will inevitably lead to high power consumption. Chip manufacturers are also considering energy saving. TI also has a trend towards energy-saving chips.

Faced with increasingly demanding security monitoring requirements, chips with faster processing speeds, higher integration, the ability to handle more complex intelligent analysis, more powerful network functions, and lower power consumption have become a common concern for security manufacturers. Although it is impossible for a chip to perfectly correspond to all functions on the market, market expectations are always the direction of chip manufacturers' efforts.