ONVIF and other standards are good in the long term for inoperability, but systems have yet to be 100-percent open. “ONVIF at the moment is limited to live viewing directly from the camera,” Pigram said. “Replay and retrieving video from where it's recorded will be addressed in the future.”
“The end user or customer expects an ONVIF camera to work directly, but they will be disappointed,” said Gerrit Schreiber, Senior PM at Basler. “You will see in many tenders that ONVIF is a must, but they do not use ONVIF at all.”
Although ONVIF is not fully compatible between versions 1.01 and 1.02, particularly for PTZ service, it depends on each member to state which version they support. “ONVIF is not specifying how the video needs to be encoded,” said Sachin Khanna, PM for CCTV, Bosch Security Systems. “ONVIF specifies the control protocol on how to setup and get a video stream from a network camera or an IP encoder.”
Most new video devices have basic support for ONVIF, PSIA or both. “In the coming years, a winner will naturally emerge, but in the interim, having two specs to choose from is much preferred to having 50,” Johnston said.
Applications
The detail megapixel cameras offer lends them to a wide range of applications. “Megapixel cameras provide crisp, detailed images that enable operators to read fine details in the distance like license plates, to see the face of the driver inside an automobile, to read the suit on a playing card or to see the denomi-nation of money used in PoS and gaming applications,” Zhou said. “These traits lend themselves to a myriad of applications for both security-centric and for business and process management applications in areas such as retail to monitor purchasing habits, quality control and automated manufacturing, medical for surgical applications and so on.”
Just as smart phones have become more open for apps, network cameras are opening up to new users. “We're opening up the camera to our partners to be able to put their application code directly in the camera,” Johnston said. “For the moment, the most popular ideas have been integrated analytics and local recording for network fail-over systems. As the system matures and an application marketplace evolves for the security industry, many exciting possibilities will soon appear on the horizon.”
Specifying Megapixel
As megapixel cameras have b e c ome mo re c ommon, the y are being specified for projects more frequently. However, some expectations are beyond what the technology can offer today, presenting a gap between reality and fantasy. “We've seen an actual spec written, asking for 3-megapixel cameras recording 25 fps at the best quality and stored to a 500-gigabyte hard drive,” Lim said. “The storage was expected to archive for three months. If we have 20 units of 3-megapixel cameras recording at 25 fps at the highest resolution, it will take half an hour, maximum, to use up 500 gigabytes. The reality is many, even consultants, don't understand how big 3-megapixel is at 25 fps.”
From a solution standpoint, adapting megapixel cameras includes upgrading back-end displays and storage, said Alf Chang, Senior Consultant for A&S magazines and a former installer. If deploying megapixel cameras requires a complete computing upgrade, the migration to IP faces many roadblocks.