Industry should not go headlong into compression

I would like to take this opportunity to raise a voice of caution. The Industry should be careful not to go headlong into using compressed video systems, such as MPEG, where valuable information from the video picture may be thrown away.

In the future, this is going to be significantly more important, as software and computers do more of the scene analysis, object detection and recognition, than the traditional human observation.

The rationale for using compressed video technologies is merely to take advantage of the industry standard IP based network systems. However, it is now possible to replicate the advantage of the IP based networks without compressing the video. It is therefore appropriate to suggest that in the future, it should be the application, rather than the network technology which decides if a CCTV system should use compressed or uncompressed video.

Only by considering what the video images will be used for, not only in terms of image processing, but also when it comes to managing the immediate scene, processing information from the surrounding area and distributing the images to multiple locations and agencies, is it possible to truly optimise the approach, and decide if compressed or uncompressed CCTV technology is the way forward for a particular application.

We need to think about the new needs of our end users – picture quality and image content are crucial at this time and the challenge here is for our industry to keep pace with the advances in technology. CCTV monitoring has never been more crucial to security – at a time of heightened demands on our industry and of stretched resources in the police and security industries we need to embrace new technologies and thus build on the strong reputation of our industry.