At the end of this past October, ONVIF finalized the release of Profile T, the latest part of the ONVIF Standard. First introduced in 2008 as an open collaboration between some of the most trusted names in the security industry, ONVIF sought to create an industry-wide standard for IP surveillance cameras and hardware, in order to ensure compatibility amongst brands. Profile T offers more feature sets for metadata streaming and analytics than its predecessor, Profile S.
Today’s surveillance cameras and systems make far greater use of bandwidth and storage than past systems, and properly and effectively managing those systems continues to become increasingly more common. Profile T was released with these requirements in mind, with a new media service that offers support for video streaming and compression in H.264 (common codec) as well as H.265.
Efficient Video Compression
While already in use across systems by many different brands,H.265 is still less popular than other compression formats. It’s gaining steam, however, and is likely to overtake H.264 in the next few years as the codec of choice. H.265 offers better and more efficient video compression than H.264 allowing systems to use less storage space for the same amount of video footage – which saves physical storage needs and also cuts down on the overall cost of maintaining a storage system.
VMS and IP Camera Support
Profile T also offers support for new technologies and features that aren’t quite as common, such as bidirectional audio streaming, with both input and output at camera level supported. The new profile will also use standardized event types, ensuring all video management systems use the same event and metadata and can thus support all IP cameras from ONVIF-compliant manufacturers and brands. Specific functions this covers include: alerts for tampering, digital input and relay output.
The new profile will even allow specific areas of images to be selected and analyzed with conditional motion detectors found in certain analytics and VMS systems. With video analytics becoming increasingly popular and more integral to security efforts in all industries, these features of Profile T will likely become one of its highlighted strengths.
ONVIF continues to be the leading standard initiative for interoperability and compliance of components across the physical security industry, and Profile T is only the latest development in the rapidly evolving field.
