Intelligent video surveillance combines situational awareness with flexible encoding

The explosion of the number of video surveillance cameras used by government, business and private homes today has brought with it many issues relating to the management of video feeds, network congestion, rapid disk space consumption and degraded levels of image quality. To solve these problems, processor design specialist Stretch has come up with the Intelligent Encoder Software Development Kit (SDK), the first video surveillance encoder with built-in intelligence for the Video Surveillance Industry that combines situational awareness with flexible encoding.

The new Intelligent Encoder SDK makes possible IP cameras and DVRs that can adapt their consumption of bandwidth and disk space based on either observed actions or changes in network and storage capacity. Available for use in IP Network Cameras or Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), the Intelligent Encoder SDK consists of a variable resolution, variable frame rate, multi-standard video encoder supporting MJPEG and H.264 along with integrated video analytics.

The Stretch Intelligent Encoder integrates advanced video analytics, including region of interest, motion detection, scene change detection, and blind detection. When any of these changes occur, the Intelligent Encoder can not only send an alarm, it can also adapt its encoding to increase frames per second, resolution, and the quality of the encoding by using a set of rules configured by the video surveillance vendor.

The major factors that determine the amount of bandwidth IP Cameras consume or the disk space consumption of DVRs, commonly referred to as bit rate, are the resolution of the image frame, the number of frames per second (fps) encoded, the encoding standard used and the quality of the encoding. Stretch's Intelligent Encoder SDK supports variable resolutions from QCIF up to multi-megapixel frames, varying frame rates from 3 to 60 fps, and MJPEG and H.264 (also called MPEG4 AVC) video encoding with a variety of quality settings.

Coupling this impressive flexibility with video analytics allows IP cameras and DVRs to actively manage bandwidth and disk space consumption based on the situations of a scene. This ensures minimal consumption of resources during slow or uninteresting scenes, but can automatically increase quality, resolution, frames per second, and even change encoding standards on-the-fly if the integrated video analytics or the network signals a change in conditions. The Intelligent Encoder can also be configured for a constant bit rate for those situations in which the consumption of resources needs to be predictable.

The Stretch Intelligent Encoder SDK is available now for the Stretch S6000 family of software configurable processors.

An evaluation version is included with the Stretch IP camera and PCIe DVR Reference Design Kits. A royalty-free distribution version is available in either object code or source code forms.