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Improved image quality for video analytics gets help from wide dynamic range

Video analytics promises to revolutionize the use of security cameras worldwide. For instance, intelligent video solutions are being developed to identify a face from millions of possibilities, pick out a suspect in a crowded stadium, detect a group of potential terrorists or spot suspicious behavior on city streets or in airports.

Equally intriguing are the non-security applications for video analytics, which can improve business intelligence. For example, video analytics can be used for inventory control, and both customer traffic pattern analysis and demographic information are valuable for marketing intelligence.

effectiveness depends on the quality of the video images. Data sufficient for analysis requires that image sensors deliver wide dynamic range (WDR), high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), minimal image artifacts and accurate color reproduction.

Expectations for video analytics have exceeded the capabilities of charged-couple device (CCD) cameras. Generating consistently highquality images—regardless of lighting conditions, temperature and other environmental changes—while avoiding false alarms is difficult for traditional, analog CCD-based security cameras. For these reasons, latest generation analytics systems are relying on new digital image sensors.

Camera Limitations
Analog CCD cameras struggle to serve intelligent video applications due to the limited dynamic range, which results in over-saturated bright areas, under-exposed dark areas, poor color reproduction and interlace artifacts. These all contribute to false alarms and missed event detection. Solutions to overcome CCD deficiencies require filtering and estimation that diminishes data accuracy, reduces resolution and wastes valuable bandwidth with unusable data.

CCD sensors’ limited dynamic range leads to overflow of incident light energy, resulting in image artifacts known as saturation, blooming and vertical smearing. Saturation occurs when pixels in bright areas are overexposed, causing them to turn completely white. Blooming is the loss of color fidelity when the camera’s image sensor captures a confined area with high illumination (e.g., the sun or a bright object). Similarly, smearing occurs when large portions of captured images are lost and appear as a vertical white band as excess light energy overwhelms CCD read channels. Techniques to overcome CCD image deficiencies result in loss of luminance, color saturation and detail, delivering less accurate data for intelligent video solutions.

Another problem with CCD technology is temporal video noise caused by electron leakage on the sensor chip that appears as crosstalk in the video stream. This random video noise diminishes picture quality, contributes to false positives and increases the latency of intelligent video algorithms, which perform real-time image processing. The algorithms commonly mistake random sensor noise for scene motion.

CCD-based cameras often experience interlace artifacts that appear as saw-tooth edges around moving objects. This is due to the traditional constraints of the NTSC and PAL television standards, which have no use in video analytics applications.

In short, CCD limitations—image over saturation, video distortion due to random noise and various pronounced image artifacts— produce video streams that contain less data, forcing algorithms to estimate or guess, causing false alarms or missed incidents. In addition, extensive filtering techniques required to overcome CCD limitations take up precious bandwidth, data storage and processing time, all while reducing resolution.

Improving Video Analytics
A new category of security cameras offers WDR capabilities that improve the accuracy of video images to deliver consistent, high-quality data for video analytics. WDR refers to a camera’s ability to capture images with the highest ratio between highlights and shadows. In other words, WDR cameras can capture details and accurate color in both the lightest and darkest portions of a scene simultaneously, even with highcontrast lighting, strong backlight, glare, reflection and other uncontrolled or variable lighting conditions.

WDR is measured in decibels. As a general rule, effective video analytics requires a camera that provides 100 dB or greater dynamic range to produce high-quality data with minimum noise (high SNR), accurate color, excellent image quality and precise detail throughout all the lighting ranges of a scene.

Video analytics algorithms must often estimate what the camera “sees” in order to differentiate between foreground and background, still and moving objects, or a target or event of interest from a video artifact or other sensor errors.

WDR cameras deliver consistent, high-quality data for optimizing video applications’ algorithms in order to produce accurate estimation and identification by generating high-quality images with correct exposure for the entire scene—both highlights and shadows—high-color fidelity, sharp features with maximum detail, few or no image artifacts and low video noise.

In addition to image quality and color rendition, all-digital WDR cameras provide the best data for real-time network video analytics on the edge—that is, analytics embedded in the camera. With all-digital WDR cameras, there is no need to convert data from analog to digital, and since video analytics is implemented at the edge, only significant events are transmitted over the network, reducing traffic, false alarms, time and data storage. Even if data is analyzed after it is transmitted to a central server, WDR cameras deliver the best digital data ready for analysis, reducing storage requirements.

New Possibilities
New digital sensors have improved the image quality of security camera video to help meet the expectations of the security and analytics communities. In particular, Pixim’s Digital Pixel System® (DPS) ultra-wide dynamic range technology delivers image quality optimal for video analytics.

Cameras powered by Pixim’s specialized image processing chipsets capture details and accurate color in both the lightest and darkest portions of a scene simultaneously, even with high-contrast lighting, strong backlight, glare, reflections and other uncontrolled or variable lighting conditions. Cameras also minimize image artifacts common in CCD-based cameras, such as vertical smearing, pixel blooming, under-exposure of shadows, over saturation of highlights and interlace artifacts surrounding moving objects.

By delivering the best WDR (maximum 120 dB), Pixim enables highquality video images regardless of lighting or other environmental conditions. This technology opens a range of possibilities for developers of video analytics applications, makers of cameras and the customers who use them.

DPS technology’s ultra-wide dynamic range, high resolution, accurate color and minimal image artifacts can directly improve security in a variety of important applications, such as financial services institutions, retail stores, casinos, perimeters and borders, schools and campuses, correctional facilities and a variety of transportation-related environments, including airports, seaports, trains, light rails and buses. Beyond these security applications, high-quality images also can enable video analytics and improve business intelligence.

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