Video surveillance rides IP networks

Robust short-term growth projections for the video surveillance market underscore a big opportunity for chip makers, analysts and vendors said in the run-up to this week's ISC West Expo security conference in Las Vegas. The boom arises as video surveillance grows more pervasive and migrates to fully networked systems and the Internet Protocol (IP).

Networking allows for greater flexibility, field upgradability, increased automation and more intelligence, Mark Kirstein, vice president of multimedia content and services at iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.), said last week.

"The video surveillance market is going through a big change to IP-based networks and fully digital systems," said Bengt Christensson, vice president of business development at Stream Processors Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), a vendor of stream processing for DSPs that emerged from stealth mode last month. "This has been going on for a number of years, but has really started to accelerate."

Stream Processors this week will announce the SP8-G80, a lower-power counterpart to the SP16-G160 product it rolled out last month. The SP8-G80 is specifically built for use in IP cameras, pegged by iSuppli as the single biggest opportunity for chip vendors, said Christensson.

Global video surveillance camera revenue is expected to grow from $4.9 billion in 2006 to more than $9 billion in 2011, a compound annual growth rate of 13.2 percent, iSuppli said. Unit shipments of video surveillance equipment are expected to soar from 30 million in 2006 to 66 million in 2011, a 17.1 percent CAGR.

IP cameras will overtake closed-circuit television cameras as the dominant equipment in video surveillance in 2011, iSuppli predicts, resulting in a $1.25 billion market for surveillance camera chips that year, vs. $525 million in 2006. The growth will primarily benefit vendors offering video processor and interface chips, iSuppli said. On the flip side, the firm predicts that spending on image sensors will fall off based on price declines and accelerated adoption of less-expensive CMOS image sensors.

Major DSP suppliers such as Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and Freescale Semiconductor are also likely to benefit, said Will Strauss, president of market analysis firm Forward Concepts Co. (Tempe, Ariz.). But a number of less-prominent chip makers could also cash in, Strauss said. Among them are Cradle Technologies, which specializes in DSPs for video and imaging, and programmable parallel-processor vendors Ambric Inc. and Aspex Semiconductors.

And at this week's Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., "you are going to see several companies that are coming out with massively parallel SoCs [systems-on-chip] that are intended for video," Strauss said. "This is one of those things where it's still low-hanging fruit for all of these companies."

Drive for eyes
Yvonne Cager, video surveillance marketing manager at TI, said the growth in video surveillance equipment is being propelled by the "drive to have more eyes everywhere." The emergence of video analytics capabilities enables a rise in the number of cameras without a corresponding rise in manpower, she added. "That's where the intelligence and networked capabilities come in," Cager said. "You can review video and send images and information across a network. You don't have to scale manpower equally."

Indeed, San Francisco International Airport has 1,500 security cameras but only a few screens and staff on duty at any one time to monitor them, according to Steve Goldberg, president and CEO of Vidient Systems Inc., a Sunnyvale-based provider of behavior-recognition software and systems for video analytics. "With a productivity tool, you don't have to be waiting and watching the screens that aren't doing anything," he said. "It's not a total replacement for guards, but a productivity enhancement."

Stream Processors will announce this week that Vidient has chosen the SP16-G160 for its next-generation video router. The Vidient SmartCatch Intelligent Video Router IVR2400 is said to deliver four D1 channels of H.264 or MPEG-4 encoding combined with robust analytics.

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