As the trend of intelligent video surveillance strengthens, which application solutions will dominate?

In recent years, as the global security awareness has increased, the video surveillance market has continued to grow. Although the global economic crisis has hindered the development of many industries, ABI Research data shows that the global video surveillance market still maintained a 10% growth rate in 2008; and the market continued to accelerate growth when the economy began to recover in 2009. The analysis agency also predicted that the value of the entire video surveillance market will exceed US$41 billion in 2014. Driven by factors such as "safe cities", exhibitions and events, and industry security, China's video surveillance market is also growing rapidly.

The booming video surveillance market has brought huge market opportunities to chip manufacturers and system manufacturers, but also brought new challenges to developers. From the perspective of technology development trends, network video surveillance will gradually become the mainstream mode; intelligence will become the next important development direction of IP video surveillance. As IP video surveillance gradually develops towards high definition and intelligence, higher requirements are also placed on the processing power of the main chip. This issue specially invites several industry experts to discuss the development trends and design challenges of video surveillance systems, and analyze mainstream solutions.

Zheng Xiaolong, General DSP Business Development Manager of TI China: Video intelligent analysis requires a more powerful SoC system

In China's surveillance market, digital video recording systems (DVR) are still dominant, but network video recorders (NVR) and network cameras (IPNC) have great potential for development. Video intelligent analysis is becoming a hot spot in digital video surveillance, and DSP will be the driving force of this technology. There is currently no international standard for intelligent digital video analysis, so only programmable high-performance DSPs and video processors can make the implementation of more complex monitoring algorithms possible.

TI's digital signal processor (DSP) has strongly promoted the development of digital video surveillance technology, among which the milestone is the TMS32 0DM6 42 general-purpose digital media processor. The digital media processing single-chip system DavinciTM launched by TI later provides a powerful platform for digital video surveillance. Davinci's various series of platforms can fully cover all application directions of digital video surveillance, including two main development directions: ARM as the main control processor and DSP as the main processor. Their common feature is that they can support multiple video compression formats, including H.264/MPEG-4, etc. All DSP cores have the ability to support VCA.

At present, the solutions based on DSP SoC dominate the monitoring market. At the same time, some FPGA manufacturers hope to show their advantages in differentiation and customization. By combining FPGA devices and MPU/DSP for monitoring applications, designers can benefit from the inherent flexibility of programmable coprocessors and use FPGA to focus on developing algorithms to fully utilize the processing power of MPU/DSP. Some manufacturers have adopted the DSP+FPGA approach in their multi-channel video monitoring system hardware platform, using TI's TMS320DM6437, which has only one digital video input interface. In order to connect 8-channel video decoders, it is necessary to add coupling logic between the video decoder and the video input interface of the DSP, and the programmable FPGA can easily realize the coupling logic between the two.

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In order to meet the needs of the future digital video surveillance market, greater flexibility is necessary. Video compression technology will develop towards intelligent encoding and decoding, traditional monitoring will still develop towards real-time intelligent analysis, and optical systems will be more closely integrated with digital electronic systems. To this end, TI has made preparations and is currently developing a more powerful SoC system, whose specifications include support for multiple video formats, fixed-point and floating-point DSP compatible support for VCA, high-performance ISP video front-end support, etc., all of which will bring a new look to the field of digital video surveillance.

ADI Technical Marketing Manager Zhan Ke: Converging processors to improve intelligent analysis and processing capabilities

After several generations of technological evolution, video surveillance systems are moving towards networking (IP) and intelligence. In addition, the coexistence of analog and digital surveillance systems will also be a feature of the Chinese security market in the next few years.

As a mid-to-high-end solution, DSP is the mainstream processor in the current Chinese surveillance market. ASIC SoC is a latecomer and has a certain impact on the market. In addition, FPGA is also trying to enter the market, but there are no obvious successful examples. Since there is no standard algorithm for intelligent analysis and processing at this stage, the MIPS requirements of DSP will be greatly different when implementing intelligent video analysis and processing based on different compression formats, so algorithm optimization is very critical. Due to its flexibility and high performance, DSP is better at intelligent analysis and processing.

The ideal DSP processor for image processing applications must have the following characteristics: strong core processing capability; instruction set specifically for image processing; low-power hardware architecture that facilitates large amounts of data transmission; high integration; rich software module library; and powerful development tools. For video surveillance systems, the most suitable control and processing should be a convergent processor that combines control functions and digital signal processing functions. ADI's Blackfin convergent processor is a typical example.

The Blackfin DSP processor is based on the Micro Signal Architecture (MSA) jointly developed by ADI and Intel. It integrates the advantages of traditional DSP and MCU, taking into account both event control and pure algorithm processing functions, allowing engineers to implement image preprocessing, image processing, and system control on a single chip, greatly improving the system's integration.

In terms of instruction sets, the Blackfin series DSP provides a wealth of vector instructions and video instructions for image processing. In addition, ADI also provides a variety of software modules for image processing, which are optimized specifically for Blackfin processors and have been strictly verified by the industry. These software modules can greatly reduce the development difficulty of system engineers and significantly improve system efficiency. In order to meet the new characteristics of the digital surveillance market towards intelligence, ADI's next-generation DSP processor, as a pioneer in carrying "digital reality", will provide deeper and broader support for intelligent video analysis technology.

Xilinx Asia Pacific Marketing and Application Director Zhang Yuqing: High-performance FPGAs flexibly respond to new challenges in video surveillance development

Networking, personalization and intelligence are important development trends in China's video surveillance market, and the application of video surveillance will gradually become more widespread.

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Most of the early video surveillance products in China used DSP. In multi-channel, high-resolution video encoding and decoding applications, it is difficult for DSP software to meet system requirements. FPGA uses hardware acceleration to perform multi-channel compression in real time. The advantage of FPGA is that it is programmable, which is very suitable for application designs that require high flexibility and provide differentiation. So far, video surveillance products using FPGA chips have begun mass production. The target design platform (TDP) launched by Xilinx for video surveillance applications has also facilitated the research and development of domestic Chinese companies.

The main technical trends in designing digital video surveillance systems are the need to achieve high image quality (1080p resolution), video analysis, intelligent management, IP, H.264 video compression standards, higher image signal processing clarity, device functions for applications and project algorithm functions. These new trends require developers to face challenges in low power consumption, low cost and environmental protection.

To meet these challenges, Xilinx cooperates with third-party partners in professional fields to develop IP cores and provide customers with easy-to-use turnkey solutions. For example, Xilinx cooperates with Eutecus of the United States to provide video analysis solutions based on Spartan-3A DSP. Among them, the high-performance video analysis IP—Multi-core Video Analysis Engine (MVE) has a highly optimized architecture that can significantly improve performance, mainly for high-precision original high-definition processing and analysis applications.

In February this year, Xilinx also launched the Spartan-6 FPGA, which is an ideal combination of performance and flexibility. Using a highly parallel architecture based on embedded DSP logic slices, systems developed based on Spartan-6 FPGA can process image data with original resolution at full frame rate. At the same time, the economical customizable MicroBlaze soft processor can be used to achieve leading video analysis functions. Spartan-6 FPGA not only supports these advanced functions, but also reduces the cost by up to 33% compared with the previous generation of solutions. With advanced power management and Ethernet power supply technology, power consumption can also be reduced by up to 50%.

Currently, FPGA is gradually becoming a highly flexible solution that can replace ASIC and ASSP devices in many applications and markets. This is also true in the field of video surveillance, where its application is becoming more and more extensive.

Jin Zhaowei, President of Vimicro: The next generation of monitoring systems will be more rational and standardized

China's video surveillance market has gone through three major stages: analog surveillance, digital surveillance and network surveillance. Looking at the development trend of the security surveillance industry, all components of the surveillance system are undergoing a transformation from analog to digital. Looking forward to the future development trend of the video surveillance market, a fully digital surveillance system is coming.

From the product perspective, current digital video surveillance products are mainly based on ASIC, FPGA, and DSP. These solutions have their own advantages and disadvantages, and they play their own characteristics according to different usage requirements.

It is particularly noteworthy that with the increasing integration of ASIC, system-on-chip (SoC) will become the mainstream solution for most digital video surveillance products in the future due to its high performance, low power consumption and flexibility in implementing functions through software programming.

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In particular, multi-core heterogeneous SoCs will bring new development opportunities to the design of digital video surveillance products. The future of surveillance systems depends on more advanced technology content, as well as more reasonable system design architecture.

As a core equipment and solution provider, Vimicro has customized industry solutions that combine basic functions with special functions for different industry segments.

ViVS unified media platform middleware independently developed by Vistar is a differentiated product based on customer needs. It abstracts the technical characteristics of various applications to form a stable and reliable basic platform, on which corresponding business modules can be added to achieve differentiated platform design based on needs.

The development direction of the next generation of surveillance system products will be more rational and standardized. Based on the current status of China's security surveillance industry, relevant national departments have begun to formulate the "Technical Requirements for Security Video Surveillance Digital Audio and Video Codec (SVAC)" to standardize industry standards. The SVAC standard can largely meet more new application requirements that will appear in the surveillance system. At the same time, the openness of the standard is also conducive to strengthening cooperation within the video surveillance industry chain, sharing leading technologies and industrialization results, forming healthy competition within the industry, and jointly promoting the rapid and stable development of China's video surveillance market.