Axis Zipstream Claims Average 50% Savings
Author: Ethan Ace, Published on Mar 25, 2015
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Comments (22)
Luke Maslen
Hi Ethan, thank you for a very interesting report. I will be very interested in reading IPVM's test report of bandwidth savings and image quality when the Axis Zipstream feature is released.
I wonder what would happen if Axis used their Zipstream feature in combination with H.265 compression? I'm a little surprised they aren't implementing both technologies now rather than waiting another year to support H.265. It would have put Axis in a better competitive position with Dahua who have recently started to trickle out H.265 devices. It will be interesting to see how the technologies compare as these two companies roll out their new products.
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Undisclosed #1
Won't a camera set to CBR dynamically change the compression level?
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johan Schorreel
When tested, would it be a good idea to compare it to what Panasonic can achieve with their VIQS ?
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Richard Williams
Another question would be how this and other compressions impact the recording server CPU. There are differences in CPU usage between Baseline, Main, and High profiles in H.264, so I would think it would be different on Zipstream also. How will this negatively impact a limit on maximum number of recorded cameras on an existing recorder? When designing a system, we now not only have to take into account bandwidth and storage, but compression and profile that will be used on each camera to make sure the recorder being spec'd can handle the load and if required, allow for an x factor of expansion. It keeps getting trickier.
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Steve Mitchell
This is a great strategy and I’m glad Axis is commercializing it. We did quite a bit of work on something similar in our lab and I recall seeing another [VENDOR] demo that clearly showed object segmentation with the background at a different frame rate than the moving foreground objects. Using a different Q-value for background is a clear win since the static portions of the scene should compress quite well. And treating the background/foreground with different GOP structures is much like using a different frame rate—also very effective.
One drawback can be subtle artifacts surrounding the moving foreground objects that don’t quite mesh with the background in all frames. But I feel like that tends to be an acceptable tradeoff in our industry (in contrast to entertainment—which is what a lot of the compression technology is geared towards). To me that opens interesting philosophical doors regarding applications and use cases of surveillance video and the trade offs involved for what might be possible over very low bit rates and to optimize storage—constraints that the entertainment industry doesn’t tend to wrestle with as much.
Of course the math involved in object segmentation and background subtraction is computationally expensive and it happens right behind the imager. And a good implementation requires close coordination with the compression hardware. So a hardware based implementation makes sense.
The relationship of this to H264/H265 can be distinct. My impression is this strategy effectively filters noise out of the static background so you’re sending what is mostly the same picture to the compressor every frame. Thus the resulting bit rates are low. But the magic happens “before” the compression. So compatibility with H264/H265 is preserved in the output. To answer the question of why aren’t they doing this with H265 might be because H265 decoders are still not widely available in our market and simply aren’t ready yet. In other words, this can give big wins even within H264, and the industry isn’t ready for H265 anyway..
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John Honovich
Axis has added a teaser 30 second Zipstream demo video:
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #2
Hi Ethan and John.
As I remember Hikvision also claims a sort of bandwith saving. They call it "Smart ROI" http://www.cips.az/2015/?p=news__read&t=exhibitors&q=5&l=en
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
This reminds me of something we did back in the day at Cernium, circa 2005. The I-frames were encoded at a lower resolution than the P-frames. If you looked closely, targets were moving within a "bubble" of higher resolution. It worked well but looked weird. Customers that noticed were troubled to learn that every video frame was not a complete picture. While this is normal to us, most of our customers don't understand that. Making it obvious to them was a huge mistake.
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #4
Does anyone still have "court admissability" issues with compressed video. I remember when MPEG4 or H.264 came out and some people claimed that it wouldn't be admissable in court because of the compression technology. Of course, those same people said that MJPEG was OK - which is also compressed, just not inter-frame referenced compression.
I would think that those that fought against H.264 would hate the fact that the camera is manipulating the video, possibly leading to court issues...
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