Analyze the application areas of processing chips in video surveillance systems

With the growth of China's digital video surveillance market at an annual rate of more than 30% in the past 3-4 years and the growth of other fields, the video processing chip market has also grown accordingly. The needs of the security monitoring industry have gradually become clear, and chip manufacturers have begun to pay attention to and actively promote the video surveillance market with huge potential. Video surveillance has become a new profit competition field for chip manufacturers in addition to industrial automation, consumer electronics, telephones and other fields. The development of the video surveillance industry has attracted more and more chip manufacturers to join. The surveillance industry will definitely become an important application field for video processing chips.

In 2004, SPI was founded specifically for video surveillance applications and began to promote it in the Chinese market in 2006. When asked why SPI specifically targeted the video surveillance field, Huang Shihua, project manager of Magellan Technology Co., Ltd. (the general agent of SPI in China), said that compared with set-top boxes, telephones and other fields, the application of the security market has become more mature and the demand is more obvious. As long as the product performs well, it will definitely seize the market. At present, SPI is relying on the power of Chinese agents to start with some small and medium-sized customers and carefully cultivate its own customers. According to Chen Shiming, senior system marketing director of NXP Asia Pacific, there are currently at least 25 manufacturers competing in the chip market. It can be predicted that with the increase in the number of competitors, the competition will be more intense in the future.

After the Philips PNX1300 chip was promoted and applied in China in 1999, TI launched the general-purpose digital media processor TMS320DM642 in 2003, officially entering the field of digital video surveillance in China. Around 2004, HiSilicon, as the world's first semiconductor company to launch the H.264soc surveillance chip, entered everyone's field of vision after more than three years of research and development. Almost at the same time, Taiwan's Shengmai Technology's parent company (Faraday) began to integrate ARMcore, compatible with FA526CPU and MPEG4/MJPEGcodec and multiple peripheral IPs, creating a video codec chip SoC tailored for digital surveillance.

As telecom operators continue to increase their investment in the security monitoring market, network monitoring began to take shape in 2007. Lai Rongxing, director of the product marketing planning department of Taiwan Shengmai Technology, predicts that the growth rate of network monitoring equipment such as DVS, IPcamera, and NVR will double in the future, which will further attract chip manufacturers to increase their investment in the video security market.

Today's HD video codecs

After nearly 10 years of development, the encoding capability of chips has been greatly improved. Previously, 10 chips were needed to achieve 1080i image quality, but now only two or three are needed. Considering market demand, the pursuit of better image quality is a very reasonable and eternal requirement for users. With the advent of the era of intelligent monitoring, in order to meet the requirements of monitoring systems for video image analysis and processing, such as license plate recognition and face recognition, higher requirements are placed on image quality, such as high-definition format. This poses a greater challenge to the encoding and decoding capabilities of chips.

"For us, the front-end chip manufacturers, the most important thing is to improve the clarity of video images. Our original product resolution was only about 400 lines. TW2864 uses a 10-bit ADC and an enhanced 4H adaptive comb filter to increase the image clarity to more than 450 lines, and can achieve better image quality, rich color quality and image acuity." said Cheng Liming of TECHWELL.

On the other hand, the continuous upgrading of compression algorithms also changes the image quality. As the mainstream compression format in the market develops towards H.264 and even more advanced algorithm formats, chip manufacturers are pursuing continuous improvement of compression ratio and algorithm optimization. "In terms of computational complexity, MPEG-4 is 4 times more complex than JPEG, and H.264 is more than 3 times more complex than MPEG4. In addition to the basic requirements of decoder compatibility and encoder compression quality, high-speed system architecture, memory bandwidth, high-efficiency DMA controller, and even multi-core parallel processing are all key to whether SoC performance is excellent.

Judging from the products launched by mainstream chip manufacturers in the current market, most of them support HD formats. For example, ADI's ADV202 and 212 products can support HD formats. TI's DM355 can support MPEG4 real-time encoding at 720p, with a bit rate of 4Mbp to 8Mbps, and can be used as the core processor of HD network cameras or HD video servers. It is understood that TI's H.264 real-time encoding chip that can support 720p will also be launched soon. The birth of HD encoding chips will enable video surveillance products to obtain higher image quality at a lower bit rate.

In recent years, China's security monitoring market has developed rapidly and attracted worldwide attention. As the mainstream product in the domestic monitoring industry, DVR products have been leading the trend for 5 or 6 years. Under the guidance of digital monitoring technology, the domestic monitoring market has experienced explosive growth. For DVR alone, the annual growth rate exceeds 40%. As the market develops in depth, the networking, intelligent and platform-based trends of digital monitoring products are becoming increasingly obvious.