The birth of each standard seems to bring new development signals to the industry's coding technology. Both MPEG4 and H defined by ISO and ITU. 264 international standards or domestic standards drafting group developed AVS, SVAC and other domestic standards, who occupy the standard high ground, the corresponding standard setters occupy the commanding heights of the video codec industry. And there have been news recently, H. The 265 standard is about to be born. What signal will the international standard bring to the security industry? What will happen to the development of the industry? Industry insiders are waiting to see.

When the business in the industry to H. When the 264 video coding standard is widely accepted, H. The upcoming news of the 265 standard is like a blockbuster, setting off an uproar in the industry. On June 25, 2012, the International Telecommunications Union (hereinafter referred to as the ITU) published a work plan project on its official website. The "High efficiency video coding" (HEVC also called H.265) technical standard originally scheduled for 2008 to 2010 was introduced. It is expected to be launched in January 2013.

It is understood that currently in the security industry, audio and video encoding and decoding standards are mainly used by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) mpeg4 and ITU jointly launched H. 264 compression standard. Secondly, it is the "Information Technology Advanced Audio Video Coding" (hereinafter abbreviated as AVS) standard independently researched and developed by China and "Surveillance Video and Audio Coding (SVAC)" which is independently developed for the security industry.

First, the new standard hits H. 265 will be launched in January next year, according to Wang Yixue, product manager of Shenzhen Liante Microcomputer Information Technology Development Co., Ltd., H. The 264 standard has only just matured in the industry. He told reporters, “When I first entered the security industry, most companies used the MPEG4 encoding standard. A few years later, the H.264 encoding standard was accepted by most security companies. At that time, the products developed by our company were embedded. MPEG4 and H.264 two encoding standards." For H. With the advent of the new standard, Wang Yixue seemed very calm. He said that with the development of high-definition, it is of great significance to be able to formulate new video coding standards that meet the high-definition standards to promote the progress of the security industry.

After consulting the data, the reporter found that the MPEG4 encoding standard widely used in the security industry is the video encoding standard introduced by the ISO Working Group in 1999. The standard is mainly aimed at the application requirements of multimedia communications such as video conferencing and video telephony. Different from the previous compression methods, the MPEG4 standard is based on video content and interaction, and uses an object-oriented compression method, which greatly improves the compression rate.

And the H introduced in 2003. 264 is a video coding standard developed by the Joint Video Working Group composed of ITU and ISO. It is understood that H. 264 has a very high compression performance, under the same image quality conditions, H. The compression ratio of 264 is more than twice that of MPEG2 and 1.5 times-2 times that of MPEG4. Compression, for example, is mainly due to the low bit rate. Compared with MPEG2 and MPEG4, H. 264 compression technology greatly reduces the user's download time and data traffic. In addition, H. 264 also has high-quality smooth images, precisely because of this, after H. 264 compressed video data requires less bandwidth and is more economical during network transmission.

As far as domestic standards are concerned, AVS is the second-generation source coding standard with independent intellectual property rights in China, and it is also a common basic standard for the digital audio and video industry.

According to the data, the "Information Technology Advanced Audio and Video Coding" issued by the National Standardization Administration Committee was formally implemented on March 1, 2006. The AVS standard officially became a national standard. Although the AVS standard has been promulgated for many years, the implementation status is not optimistic. There are few companies in the industry that adopt the AVS standard video chip processor. "The criteria for companies to choose are mainly based on the trend of the industry, and assess whether the standard is feasible. If it is a mature and stable standard, everyone will choose to use it. Although AVS is China's national standard, its use is not yet mature and the enterprise has not yet fully accepted it. Perhaps this is an important reason for the promotion of the standard." Chen Chumin, head of Shenzhen Sanchen Technology Co., Ltd., said in an interview with reporters. In his eyes, stable standards will become the company's first choice.

Last year, the SVAC standard jointly developed by the National Security and Alarm Systems Standardization Technical Committee (hereinafter referred to as TC100) and China Star Micro and other security companies was the first coding standard for the security industry in China. This standard was formally established on May 1, 2011. Implementation. It is understood that SVAC is the first technical standard that aims to address the unique requirements of the security surveillance industry and is particularly important for establishing public security and crime prevention systems. The reporter learned from various investigations that in addition to Vimicro and Hikvision, there are companies such as China Star Electronics, Hanbang Gaoke, Huasan, Yaan and Tiandi Weiye that also participated in the drafting of the standard. In this regard, Wang Yixue said that the current industry is still MPEG4 and H. 264 standards, it will take time to promote SVAC national standards. "As a national standard, its compression ratio and stability are still limited. This may be an important reason for the SVAC standard to be blocked."

Listen to H. The news that the 265 standard will be born in January of the next year shows that the majority of downstream manufacturers have shown their fright at first. Chen Chumin was surprised when he got the news, and then told reporters, “What are the advantages of the H.265 standard? Can it produce enough attractiveness for the company? How stable is it? It may take time for this series of questions to test. According to relevant data, H. The standard 265 compression ratio is in H. 264 is based on a 67% increase. In addition, H. The 265 adopts a more flexible coding structure to improve coding efficiency, including Coding Units, Predict Units, and Transform Units.

Second, H. Will the 265 standard become mainstream?

“The reason that ITU will launch the H.265 standard next year is the trend of the times.” Wang Yixue also stated that in the rapid development of the digital video application industry chain, video applications are facing high definition, high frame rate, and high The trend of the development of compression rate, the current mainstream video compression standard protocol H. The limitations of 264 began to highlight. For a higher definition, higher frame rate, higher compression video applications, it's no harm to introduce a new standard. This will promote the development of the high-definition surveillance industry.

Background H. 264 standards can not keep up with the pace of development of high-definition?

There is a point of view that, with the development of high-definition resulting in the explosive growth of the number of macroblocks, in this case macroblock-level parameter information such as prediction mode, motion vector, reference frame index, and quantization level for encoding a macroblock The number of code words occupied is excessive and the number of code words used to code the residual part is significantly reduced.

Secondly, the advent of high-definition has also led to a significant increase in the resolution of security equipment, and the information content of images represented by a single macroblock has been greatly reduced. This will result in a similar increase in the similarity of the low-frequency coefficients of the adjacent 4x4 or 8x8 blocks, resulting in a large amount of redundancy.

A large amount of redundancy indicates that the amplitude of the motion vectors of the same motion will greatly increase, H. 264 uses a motion vector predictor to encode the motion vector difference using Columbus index coding. The feature of this coding method is that the smaller the number, the smaller the number of bits used. Therefore, with a large increase in the magnitude of the motion vector, H. The method used to predict and encode motion vectors in 264 will gradually reduce the compression rate.

In addition, H. Some key algorithms of 264 use CAVLC and CABAC two kinds of context-based entropy coding methods, deblock filtering and so on all require serial coding, and the degree of parallelism is relatively low. For CPUs with very high degree of parallelism such as GPU/DSP/FPGA/ASIC, H. This serialization of 264 has increasingly become a bottleneck that limits the performance of the computing.

The existence of the above four problems makes the ITU can not wait to introduce new H. 265 coding technology.

“We know that now security, intelligence, and IT have become the industry trend. The ability to provide higher coding technology is a decisive factor that directly affects the development of HD.” Wang Yixue said that the MPEG4 is now used. And H. According to the 264 standard, “H.264 has a strong anti-error code feature and can perform video transmission in channels with high packet loss rate and severe interference. Among these two standards, H.264 has been improved due to several improvements. The technical measures of image quality and increasing the compression ratio, save 50% of the code rate than MPEG4, have strong anti-interference, easy to obtain a stable image, and the compression ratio is the most important indicator in the video transmission process. Said that the H.264 standard's advantages in coding technology make it more advanced than MPEG4." So, H. 264 was widely accepted by the industry.

Chen Chumin believes that if it can introduce more superior technologies for companies to test and accept, then this program will inevitably be accepted by the market.

Advantage Five major technical support. 265 standard, of course, with the current H. Compared with the 264 standard, H. The 265 standard has excellent technical support. According to the data analysis of the first draft internal draft “Highefficiency video coding (HEVC) text specification draft6 released by the JCT-VC Joint Working Group on February 17, 2012:

First of all, H. The 265 standard has a flexible coding structure. In H. In 265, the size of the macro block is taken as H. The 16x16 of 264 is extended to 64x64 to facilitate the compression of high resolution video. At the same time, H. The 265 adopts a more flexible coding structure to improve coding efficiency, including Coding Units, Predict Units, and Transform Units.

Second, it has a flexible block structure - RQT (ResidualQuad-treeTransform). RQT is an adaptive transform technique. This idea is for H. Extension and extension of ABT (Adaptive Block-size Transform) technology in 264/AVC. For inter-frame coding, it allows the size of the transform block to be adaptively adjusted according to the size of the motion compensation block; for intra-frame coding, it allows the size of the transform block to adapt according to the characteristics of the intra-prediction residual. Adjustment. The transformation of large blocks relative to small blocks can provide better energy concentration on the one hand, and can save more image details after quantization, but on the other hand it will bring more ringing after quantization. effect. Therefore, according to the characteristics of the current block signal, the adaptive selection of the transform block size can obtain the best compromise among the energy concentration, the degree of detail retention, and the ringing effect of the image.

Again, SampleAdaptiveOffset. Within the codec loop, SAO is located after Deblock. By classifying the reconstructed image, the pixel value of each type of image is added or subtracted by one offset to achieve the purpose of reducing distortion, thereby increasing the compression rate and reducing the code stream. With SAO, the average bit stream can be reduced by 2% to 6%, while the encoder and decoder's performance consumption is only increased by about 2%.

In addition, adaptive loop filtering (AdaptiveLoopFilter). The ALF is located within the codec loop, after Deblock and SAO, to recover the reconstructed image to achieve a minimum mean squared error (MSE) between the reconstructed image and the original image. The coefficients of ALF are calculated and transmitted at the frame level. ALF can be applied to the entire frame, or ALF can be performed for a block-based or quadtree-based partial area. If the ALF is based on a partial area, the indicated area information must also be passed. Additional information.

Finally, H. 265 uses a parallel design approach. The current chip architecture has evolved from single-core performance to multi-core parallelism, so in order to adapt to chips with very high degree of parallelism, H. 265 introduces many optimization ideas for parallel operations.

H supported by five highlights. The 265 new standard may again set off a new battle for the compression standard in the industry.

Third, the promotion of new standards or will be blocked?

Coming soon H. The 265 standard message was released, prompting a hot debate in the industry. The new standard can bring surprises to the industry, which is precisely the question of corporate thinking. "If the standard can really promote the development of high-definition, it may set off a new standard war in the industry." Chen Chumin believes.

Issue 1 The chip maker has the right to determine some of the industry insiders, H. Whether the 265 standard can become the new mainstream compression standard depends on the chip manufacturer. "Of course, the ITU has set standards, but whether the standards can be widely promoted, mainly in the production of audio and video processing chip manufacturers." Chen Chumin said that according to this logic, the production of audio and video processing chip manufacturers will become H. 265 Standards lead the success of success. "What kind of compression technology is embedded in video processing chip manufacturers, downstream manufacturers can only passively accept when buying chips." Wang Yixue said. In fact, security companies are only passive recipients.

At present, there are few manufacturers at home and abroad that can develop and produce audio and video processing chips. According to the reporter's understanding, Shengmai, Yingjia, Hass, TI, Anba, Zhongxingwei, and Zhongweijiji have a small number of manufacturers with audio and video processing chip production capabilities. However, what kind of compression standards these chip makers use is not yet conclusive. The reporter noted that many video processing chips produced by Vimicro have adopted the compression processing technology of the SVAC standard. Wang Yingjie, manager of R&D of China Century Century Century, told the reporter that the company's JV9800 post-processing video chip can easily use any mainstream video compression standard.

Although upstream chip makers are the direct motivators for which standards they choose, what kind of compression standards are used is whether the standards themselves are superior.

It is understood that ITU and ISO have just introduced the international standard H. 264 hours have been sought after by the market. According to related statistics, by the end of 2011, 80% of video products use H. 264 encoding standard, and with support H. The number of 264 decoding devices is increasing, and this share will increase further.

The reason why H. It is self-evident that the 264 standard can quickly promote its superiority. According to Qi Xing, president of China Star Electronics R & D, he told reporters, H. 264 and other video compression standards are developed for broadcasting and television entertainment entertainment applications. The application is a program source for many audiences, can be produced at any cost, and optimized through post-processing; and video surveillance is a large number of video sources Faced with a small number of viewers (security administrators), the cost of the front-end cannot be too high, and the scene must be restored to the users in a truly synchronized manner, so as to obtain a high-quality video encoding stream.

According to Qiu Jun’s point of view, most of the shooting conditions in radio and television applications are controllable, and different camera devices can be used according to different environments. The restoration of video and audio content can be easily achieved. The shooting conditions of many application scenarios of video surveillance are uncontrolled, and a set of equipment must be used to meet the requirements of all-weather monitoring. How to ensure high-fidelity restoration of the video and audio information in the surveillance site after coding and decoding is a great challenge.

In view of various factors, in 2011 TC100 and China Star Micro and other companies jointly developed SVAC standards. The standard is specifically adapted to the application of broadcast video and audio codec standards in the field of security monitoring. It is based on the current needs and future development of video and audio monitoring in China's social and public security, and innovatively proposed a number of applications for security monitoring. The special requirements and means of video and audio encoding and decoding, adoption of high-precision video acquisition, variable region of interest (ROI) coding, scalable video coding (SVC) and other technologies, and through the monitoring of dedicated information, encryption and authentication Support, etc., makes the video surveillance system more powerful and flexible.

Qiu Hao said that the SVAC standard and H. The 264 standard has a lot of interactivity and flexibility. Compared with the MPEG4 standard, both have obvious advantages. "Specifically speaking, compared with the MPEG4 standard, SVAC (or H.264) has obvious advantages in compression efficiency. The SVAC standard is basically equivalent to the H.264 standard in compression efficiency. Moreover, the SVAC standard has designed some technical tools. Make it more efficient and flexible in security monitoring applications, such as variable region of interest (ROI) coding, SVC layered coding, monitoring of special information coding, etc., while supporting encryption authentication, from the data source to ensure the security of monitoring data And integrity. From the perspective of intellectual property rights, SVAC standards with independent intellectual property rights will promote the development of the entire security industry chain."

These features of the SVAC standard support high-precision video data encoding, support for advanced technologies such as CABAC, support for variable region of interest (ROI) coding, support for scalable video coding (SVC), dual-core audio coding for ACELP and TAC switching, and support Features such as encoding of voice recognition feature parameters, support for monitoring of specific information such as absolute time reference information and special monitoring events, and support for data security protection. The above characteristics are the primary factors that push the SVAC standard. Of course, pushing the SVAC standard also requires standard-setting departments and companies to work harder.

Question No. 2 The New Standard Fees Are Not Reliable With the widespread use of international compression technologies, the standard payment issue has also become a time bomb for China’s surveillance industry. And recently the rumors, H. The 265 standard may also be paid.

Qiu Hao believes that the way of charging has certain difficulties in the implementation process. "In fact, the H.264 standard is not free. It has a set of charging standards, but it has not been fully implemented."

"We think that the H.265 standard charging fee is not very feasible. It is clear that charges will only hinder the promotion of the H.265 standard. If you want to charge, a large number of users will find alternative ways," Wang Yingjie said.

However, there are also some companies that do not have much to do with the success or failure of standards promotion. According to Duan Xianchang, director of monitoring products division of Shenzhen Panhai Sanjiang Electronics Co., Ltd., the key lies in whether the standard has unparalleled superiority. "Since the H.265 is a compression standard specifically designed for high-definition surveillance, it needs to be verified by fact that its compression ratio is not advertised by the outside world. If there is really enough advantage, then payment will not be a problem."

Although the standard payment problem in the field of video surveillance has not yet been fully covered. But whether or not users will be charged in the future is a thought-provoking issue. As one industry insider points out, when an industry is in a weak situation, the patent issue is in an insignificant position. Patent owners may not value this patent fee. However, once the industry grows, the huge patent fees will It will prompt the patent owner to exercise this right.

Question 3: Beware of the risk of leaking Information that comes with the leak is a problem. "If the international compression standard is adopted, if the video coding is deciphered, how can the loss be compensated? Therefore, the domestic SVC standard for intellectual property rights has been pushing for it," the industry told reporters.

Qiu Xin said that the Ministry of Public Security clearly stated in the “Task Book for the Integration and Sharing of Video Image Information in Public Security Organs across the Country” (Gongxinxin 2012 No. 11) that it explicitly required the adoption of “Technical Requirements for Security Monitoring Digital Video and Audio Coding and Decoding”. The National Standard (GB/T28181-2011) of the "Technical Requirements for Information Transmission, Switching, and Control of Security Surveillance Video Surveillance Networking Systems" requires that "video compression codec and audio codec in networked systems should be preferentially adopted GB/T25724-2010 (abbreviation SVAC)” also requires “priority in adopting SVAC national standards” in industry standards such as the “Guidelines for City Monitoring and Alarming Networking Systems” (GA/T669). In addition, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities have also added support for SVAC national standards to local standards. We understand that in other places, we will gradually make support for SVAC standards in the establishment or revision of local standards. Clear requirements. In the bidding for major domestic projects, adopting the SVAC or AVS standard that is dominated by domestic companies may become the dominant government project in the future.

Fourth, the standard of security under the battle of the pattern with the frequency of the standard, the standard battle has become a new issue of the security industry. A few years ago, the AVS standard developed by the Working Group of Digital Audio Video Codec Standards approved and established by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Information Industry had just encountered “Waterloo” in its promotion in the security industry. "You look at how many security companies are using AVS compression standards," an industry source told reporters. After investigation, the reporter learned that when the AVS standard was just promoted, only a few companies such as Jinglong were adopted.

The SVAC standard formally implemented in 2011 also encountered promotion problems. As a company that formulates the SVAC standard, Qiu Hao participated in the drafting of the SVAC standard. "So far more than 40 companies have joined the SVAC Standard Alliance." Qiu Hao said, but as a non-mandatory standard, SVAC promotion still faces many obstacles. If the country adopts the SVAC standard, it will be beneficial to promote the upgrading of video and audio codec technology and product replacement for security surveillance, which will facilitate the interconnection of different manufacturers' devices. Of course, this will inevitably bring about changes in the security monitoring industry and market structure.

For enterprises, due to the different technical solutions of each standard, it is difficult to be compatible with each other. An alternative solution is to support the three standards simultaneously in the decoding device or the decoding software to adapt to the encoded data stream output by the encoding device conforming to different standards. However, this method will increase the decoder's development complexity and cost.

For the upcoming H. 265 standards, Qiu Hao also expressed that they will pay close attention. He told reporters: "The H.265 standard technology program is based on a substantial increase in the implementation of the complexity, in exchange for higher coding compression efficiency. It is suitable for monitoring this type of real-time coding and implementation of higher complexity The application will be subject to further analysis and evaluation. We will pay close attention to the draft version of the upcoming H.265 standard published in the first edition, and evaluate the feasibility of adopting the standard.” Industry insiders believe that H. Because of its great improvement in compression efficiency, parallel processing capability, and network adaptability, the development and application of the 265 standard will certainly push video codec theory and applications to a new level.

In Wang Yingjie's view, MPEG4 has basically faded out of the security market, and the promotion of SVAC standards is still difficult and it will continue to use H for some time in the future. 264 is the mainstream. H. It can take time for the 265 standard to dominate the security landscape.

Chen Chumin believes that it is the price factor that dominates the security market's compression technology market. The price of the product will directly affect the market acceptance, and will also affect the company's cost accounting. Who will become the mainstream of the compression standard depends on the influence of various factors, including the market, policies, and so on.

Qiu Yu told reporters: “The coding standard has always been a focus issue in the monitoring industry. From our own experience, domestic companies only have an in-depth analysis of industry and user needs, understand the direction of technological development and market dynamics, and strengthen investment in core technology research and development. Actively participate in the formulation of relevant technical standards, in order to change the standard passive bearer is the standard setter. "In this case, domestic companies can grasp the initiative to develop standards. Only by making necessary preparations for domestic companies to enter the international high-end market.

Chen Chumin said: "The MPEG4, SVAC, AVS, H.264, H.265 will become the mainstream? The market is the final tester."