New opportunities in the field of security video surveillance. H.264 will replace other compression standards.
The latest video compression standard H.264 is expected to become the most popular video standard in the coming years. It has already proven itself in such electronic devices as mobile phones and digital video players. In the field of security video surveillance, H.264 offers new opportunities in terms of reducing the cost of the required amount of disk space for data storage and increasing overall efficiency.
H.264 (sometimes referred to as MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC) is an open, licensed standard that supports the most efficient video compression technologies available today. An H.264 encoder can reduce the file size of digital video by more than 80% compared to Motion JPEG and by 50% compared to the traditional MPEG-4 Part 2 standard without sacrificing image quality. There are many factors that make H.264 the most suitable standard for use in video surveillance applications.
Data rate comparison between different video standards for a 115-second video stream with the same image quality. H.264 is at least three times more efficient than MPEG-4 without motion compensation, and at least six times more efficient than Motion JPEG.
Reduction in storage costs and bandwidth
The main benefit of dramatically reducing file sizes is the reduction in storage space and bandwidth requirements. With the same amount of video data and the same image quality, a video surveillance system that supports H.264 compression dramatically reduces storage costs and bandwidth usage by at least 50% compared to traditional compression technologies. As systems expand and image resolution requirements increase, coupled with higher frame rates, H.264 will become a decisive factor in determining the effectiveness of various systems and solutions.
High resolution and frame rate
Depending on the application, there are different ways to take advantage of the impressive compression ratio of H.264. A common approach today is to limit the frame rate or reduce the image resolution to meet the storage capacity limitations of the application. This has a negative effect on the video image, which becomes either blurry or less detailed. The advent of H.264-enabled security video equipment in these applications provides the opportunity to combine increased frame rates with image resolution in different ways, thereby achieving higher image quality.
More efficient use of megapixel cameras
H.264 is expected to accelerate the transition to megapixel cameras in the video surveillance industry. Today, the downside of megapixel cameras is the huge size of the recorded video data. As mentioned above, H.264 significantly reduces file size without sacrificing image quality. This highly efficient compression technology will likely find its first application in applications that require high resolution and high frame rates, such as airport security, retail stores, banks, and casinos.
Future-oriented
H.264 represents a huge leap forward in video compression technology. With support from many industries and the development of software applications targeting consumer and professional needs (such as QuickTime, Flash, YouTube, iPod, and PlayStation 3), H.264 is expected to replace other compression standards and methods in use today. As the format becomes more widely adopted in video surveillance equipment, system designers and integrators need to be confident that the products and vendors they select support this new open standard.
History of H.264
H.264 is the result of a joint project between the International Telecommunication Union's Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG). ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization, and IEC is an organization that oversees electronic and electrical standards. The name H.264 is used by the ITU-T, while ISO/IEC has named the standard MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC because it is a new element in their MPEG-4 suite.
Having undergone collective approval by telecommunications and information technology standards organizations, H.264 is expected to be more widely adopted than its predecessors.