Surveillance recorder standards

A draft document on the proposed surveillance recorder standards that aims to set interoperability standards among different surveillance recorder manufacturers is out already.  The group spearheading this thrust is called the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA) and is composed of major industry players such as GE, Pelco, Cisco, Texas Instruments, etc.

By setting a standard, the group aims to reduce problems related to managing various DVR and NVR brands in one system, which is a typical problem of large organizations which needs to maintain several backend systems to control and manage varying subsystems.

You can read more about the document at:

http://www.psialliance.org/documents/1013RaCMRel.pdf

Internet eyes video monitoring service

There is a new video monitoring company in the UK called Internet Eyes that aims to provide video and alarm monitoring service for companies reportedly using hundreds of "freelance" viewers motivated by a GBP 1200 reward prize.  Looks very promising, but I think there are issues that need to be addressed especially on reliability and accountability.  Also, the one time monthly prize money, may not be a better motivator than small but incremental prizes.  Let's see how it goes.  Their site goes live this November.

http://interneteyes.co.uk/

An invisibility cloak?

An interesting video on possible technologies that will render someone invisible.

Spoofing IP based CCTV systems

The case against the security of IP based CCTV systems was recently highlighted with the release of a new tool shown at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.  A security assessment tool, Videojak has the ability to both intercept Internet video feeds and eject false 'looped' images.

Similar in concept to Hollywood's "Mission Impossible" where the attacker can hack, monitor and record a CCTV feed (when nothing is happening), then play this back in a loop to hide the actual live feed (presumably while Tom Cruise is lowered down on a black rope).

This tool also provides the ability to intercept video conferencing.

To be on the safe side, if you are using any kind of conferencing facility you should assume that the information can be intercepted. With the popularity of IP streamed video systems we are not sure if our network is compromised or not.

It's Friday!

It's beer Friday everyone!  Good day!

CUDA

A major issue found in Network Video Recorders is high CPU utilization.  Unlike in DVRs where encoding and decoding is being done by hardware, receiving and recording multiple video streams, while encoding and decoding them for live view and remote view using just software demands a lot of processing power.  Imagine if there are 32 incoming video streams and resolution size is D1 (720X480), lacking a dedicated hardware encoder and decoder chip,  will heavily tax even the latest PC CPUs available in the market today.  In fact, no present NVR solution can display more than 4 simultaneous D1 streams while recording them at the same time.

CUDA to the rescue

Short of installing another encoder/decoder card, one can use the spare processing power of a PC GPU (Graphic processing unit) for encoding and decoding, as well as add more capabilities to the system.   Last year, Nvidia released the developer kit for CUDA for various developers, to enable applications to take advantage of the powerful NVIDIA GPUs.

What is CUDA?

CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units or GPUs that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages. Programmers use 'C for CUDA' (C with NVIDIA extensions), compiled through a PathScale Open64 C compiler, to code algorithms for execution on the GPU. CUDA architecture supports a range of computational interfaces including OpenCL and DirectCompute. Third party wrappers are also available for Python, Fortran, Java and Matlab.

The latest drivers all contain the necessary CUDA components. CUDA works with all NVIDIA GPUs from the G8X series onwards, including GeForce, Quadro and the Tesla line. NVIDIA states that programs developed for the GeForce 8 series will also work without modification on all future Nvidia video cards, due to binary compatibility. CUDA gives developers access to the native instruction set and memory of the parallel computational elements in CUDA GPUs. Using CUDA, the latest NVIDIA GPUs effectively become open architectures like CPUs. Unlike CPUs however, GPUs have a parallel "many-core" architecture, each core capable of running thousands of threads simultaneously - if an application is suited to this kind of an architecture, the GPU can offer large performance benefits.

In the computer gaming industry, in addition to graphics rendering, graphics cards are used in game physics calculations (physical effects like debris, smoke, fire, fluids); examples include PhysX and Bullet. CUDA has also been used to accelerate non-graphical applications incomputational biology, cryptography and other fields by an order of magnitude or more. An example of this is the BOINC distributed computing client.


CUDA provides both a low level API and a higher level API. The initial CUDA SDK was made public on 15 February 2007, for Microsoft Windowsand Linux. Mac OS X support was later added in version 2.0, which supersedes the beta released February 14, 2008.

GPUs are cheap, massively parallel, programmable compute devices that can be used for many general purpose (non-graphics) tasks. They are a "good fit" for many scientific applications and significant speedups (as compared to contemporary CPUs) have been reported. The CUDA language makes NVIDIA GPUs accessible to developers through a series of extensions to C (with no mention of pixels or shading!).

By harnessing CUDA, it may be possible to have high quality recording simultaneous with multiple high quality video streams for playback and remote view.  It also deloads the CPU of tasks that can help the application run faster and more smoother.  Expect to see a lot of CUDA based NVRs in the future.

Some links:

http://codingplayground.blogspot.com/2009/02/web-search-ranking-and-gpp-many-core.html
http://www.bikal.co.uk/network-video-recorder/nvr-pro.html

ARMed and ready!

We are right in the midst of an on-going battle which I am sure most haven't noticed.  You may have heard about the Intel vs AMD wars in 90's, but have you heard about ARM processors? This is the processor of choice for all our embedded devices and probably for your phone as well and probably has a larger impact in the tech industry as a whole.   Why choose arm?  It can be best answered by learning more about the chip.

From wikipedia:

"The ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by ARM Limited. It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in terms of numbers produced. They were originally conceived as a processor for desktop personal computers by Acorn Computers, a market now dominated by the x86 family used byIBM PC compatible computers. But the relative simplicity of ARM processors made them suitable for low power applications. This has made them dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market as relatively low cost and small microprocessors and microcontrollers."

Surprisingly, when someone asks who the giants of the semiconductor industry are, the names of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, float to the top of my mind. And of course, there is the colorful and controversial William Shockly, who founded Shockly Semiconductor Labs, the first major semiconductor lab in Silicon Valley. And then there is Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who along with Robert Noyce is credited with inventing the integrated circuit.  The person behind ARM is Dr. Robin Saxby; or to be more specific, Sir Robin Saxby, the founder of Advanced RISC Machines LTD (ARM) of Cambridge, England.

How big is the ARM market?

"As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than a billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor. As of 2009, ARM processors account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, iPods and other digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers."

"Consider: Intel sold its 1 billionth x86 chip in 2003. Its closest rival, AMD, broke the 500 million mark just this year. ARM, on the other hand, expects to ship 2.8 billion processors in 2009 alone -- or around 90 chips per second. That's in addition to the more than 10 billion ARM processors already powering devices today.

Pick up any mobile phone and there's a 95 percent chance it contains at least one ARM processor. If the phone was manufactured in the past five years, make that 100 percent; that goes for standard handsets as well as smartphones.

The same is true for portable media players. Whether the label says Archos, iRiver, or Sony, inside it's ARM."

Thus, ARM is a giant in the tech arena and most surprising is that folks in the U.S. haven't heard of  the almost ubiquitous ARM processor. Almost ubiquitous because the ARM processor in some form or another is at the core of almost every cell or smartphone sold today, as well as being used in billions of embedded devices around the world.  Until now these processors have mostly had life in embedded devices, cell phones and most recently in smartphones. They are the main processors used in many of the Linux-based operating systems on the market today, which you'll find in cell and smartphones, such as Apple'siPhone, and in DVD players, GPS systems, smart TVs, set-top boxes, etc.

However, we are starting to see ARM processors move into some netbook models.The one with the highest profile has been the ARM-based Qualcomm SnapDragon processor that will reportedly be used in an HP netbook somewhere down the line. And the ARM processor is also at the heart of Nvidia's Tegra processor that, like the SnapDragon, is heavily targeted at netbooks, and especially netbooks aimed at being sold through telecom providers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T, etc. They are even showing up in servers with low-voltage requirements.ARM Holdings, LTD, which is the parent company, does a lot of R&D of its own, but its real business is that of IP licensing. The ARM core is licensed to six public ARM silicon partners that are specifically taking aim at netbooks and smartbooks. These partners are Marvel, Qualcomm, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments.In emerging markets, Linux-based systems could do well. And over time, Linux-based systems based on an OS like Android could actually gain ground with carriers that want to sell subsidized netbooks in stores, and want an OS that offers more control of the users' experience and service offerings.

This is why, we chose to use ARM in our embedded devices.  Lock and load!

References:

www.wikipedia.org
www.pcmag.com
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140039/ARM_vs._Atom_The_battle_for_the_next_digital_frontier?taxonomyId=15