Without doubt, the consumer electronics market is helping to shape new technologies in surveillance.
Whereas in the 1970s it was the military and Government that drove technology advancements, in the 1980s and 1990s it was the business sector.
Today, if you want to predict the latest innovations in surveillance then you only have to look at the consumer electronics market.
This shift is not surprising when you examine the enormous growth exhibited in said market. Being a much smaller sector, security vendors have decided to work smarter here with their limited resources by adopting innovations that were originally developed for consumers and repurposing them for physical security applications.
HDTV and compression standards
A great example of this is HDTV. Fuelling the success of HDTV were industry standards ensuring compatibility among home entertainment components, which duly opened the field to greater competition. This in turn drove the costs down, making the technology more affordable for a wider audience.
Compression standards are another example. 30 years ago the plethora of incompatible compression standards created confusion among consumers. Competing factions finally joined forces in the 1990s to hammer out a single, all-encompassing standard that could deliver superior compression without compromising image quality.
The end result was H.264. Widespread adoption of that standard has followed and, today, everything from your Blu-Ray discs to your iPhone incorporate the H.264 standard.
True to form, manufacturers in the security market began to launch products supporting this new compression benchmark and have met with huge success because the technology affords end users a choice.
They can either employ H.264 compression to reduce storage costs by 10% or more, or they can maintain the same cost while doubling their frame rate or image resolution.
Parting of the ways
There are, of course, areas where consumer and business needs part ways. Not everything that works for the consumer will benefit the world of video surveillance.
A basic digital camera, for example, starts at ten megapixels and goes up as high as 20. Such high resolution is fine when you are taking one picture or frame per second, or even up to six frames per second for professional cameras.
However, in the surveillance world where situations often necessitate recording up to 30 frames per second, high resolution image sensors simply cannot keep pace.
To achieve 30 frames per second with today’s HDTV cameras the best resolution you can expect to have is about two megapixels. If you opt for higher resolution, you have to sacrifice frame rate. It’s as simple as that.
What, then, is going to be the next major innovation? Manufacturers are continuing to push the technology envelope in their effort to satisfy our perpetual craving for more advanced mobile phones, computers, TV, games and other as-yet-unimagined electronic gadgets.
Since video and audio comprise the vast majority of network traffic, we can reasonably expect a good deal of innovation in this area which will inevitably benefit physical security and video surveillance.
Other than that, it’s quite difficult to predict the next major consumer electronics breakthrough.
One thing is certain, though: we will continue to see these technological advances trickle down to the physical security and video surveillance markets.
Phil Doyle is regional director for northern Europe at Axis Communications (UK)
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