"If you are using IQeye or any other MJPEG IP camera, you are going to want to read this article!"

In this article I am going to introduce you to the Aztech codec from 3xLOGIC by showing you actual clips captured today at our office. These actual clips demonstrate the effectiveness of Aztech and how it can save you up to 90% of your video storage costs and make low-bandwidth remote streaming a pleasant reality when using cameras that produce MJPEG video. This can all be accomplished without any reduction is visual quality or resolution whatsoever.

The Why’s

Even with the dominant presence of h.264, there are still many reasons you will still want to specify MJPEG cameras, or at the very least, be required to use MJPEG either because of existing infrastructure, or the demand by clients for large high-quality megapixel cameras.

The reasons many IP megapixel cameras today still use MJPEG as their primary video compression method over h.264 include:

• Better image quality, especially at lower frame rates
• Less processing power needed both in the camera and for decompression in the client applications
• Consistent frame size for high-movement scenes

IQeye Invision for example, has long been regarded as one of the leaders in image quality and as a result has been a staunch proponent of the advantages and quality of MJPEG compared to the current industry favorite H.264, although they manufacture both type of solutions. In fact, their commitment to MJPEG continues today with the release of newer breeds of high-performance MJPEG megapixel cameras designed to provide among the best video quality in the industry.

The challenge for IQeye and any other MJPEG IP camera however, is the fact that file sizes are typically much larger than h.264 which significantly impacts storage requirements, remote access bandwidth needs, and subsequently the total cost of the project.

The How’s

To put it simply, the Aztech codec does for MJPEG what H.264 did for MPEG as we remove the temporal redundancy from the image. This means we capture occasional keyframes and only store the changes on the inner-frames. It is important to note that while H.264 was developed for broadcast applications, Aztech was designed specifically for security applications.

The main issue with H.264 (among others) is that is does not scale down well in low frame-rate applications which is what we typically see in the security arena. Comparing Aztech to H.264 we see they are roughly equivalent in size at around 15 fps or higher. When you start decreasing the frame-rate down to 10, 5 or even 3 fps, you begin to see incredible savings in stream size, while the image quality does not change.

The main issue with MJPEG of course is simply the large file size. Using Aztech, we are able to receive MJPEG, decompress it, and then recompress it using Aztech for a savings of 50-90% in almost all applications, regardless of frame-rate. 

Since we are only removing redundant information we will see no decrease in resolution or visual acuity, yet we are now able to decrease our storage requirements and stream-out video to remote viewing applications (or smartphones) over very low-bandwidth networks.

In all cases, significant performance advantages are evident. Reducing the hard drive storage by 50-90% provides direct financial impact along with the fact that up to 10x as much information can be streamed to remote client applications. 

The Real Results

Today here in our Colorado office we borrowed one of the new 5 megapixel IQeye 755 cameras from our local IQeye rep, Ivan Widdifield, and quickly captured both an outdoor clip of the parking lot and indoor clip in our demo room. 

For our test we saved the video both in IQeye’s original format which is what all other VMS systems would typically record to disk, and then using our Aztech codec. We kept the clips short so you would be able to easily download all four clips and review them yourself.

Here’s a picture of how the clips looked in the folder on my laptop. The reason for modified times of 7:44 PM and 7:52 PM on two of the clips is because I had to trim one of the outdoor clips, and one of the indoor clips to make the lengths match.

You can quickly see that both the Aztech clips are significantly smaller than the Native IQeye clips. Putting the results in the table shown below, we see that in this case Aztech offered a 68% savings for the outdoor video and a whopping 90% savings for the indoor video.

The reason for the differences in savings is due to the amount of motion experienced in the scene. The higher the motion, the less effective Aztech becomes, but in ALL cases we find at least a 50% reduction in size, and since security video typically has a good amount of reasonably static scenes, in the real world we most often see 70-80% as a typical figure.

Also note, that when you review the outdoor clip, it may look rather static, but if you take the slider and move it back and forth quickly, it will be quite obvious that the entire scene is actually moving including shadows, trees and clouds which are what the camera and codec see.

Here is a still picture for reference taken from the recording of the outdoor scene. The original files are in the zip folder at the bottom of the post.

Here are a couple of zoomed in portions of both the IQeye recording and the Aztech recording. You can see they are virtually identical in quality.

Now here is a still taken from the indoor recording.

And here are two zoomed in sections for comparison.

Conclusion

Attached you will find a zip folder with the four original clips and a player that will allow you to playback the clips.

To play the clips, simply open the player and then go to file->open and find the clips on your drive.

When replaying the video, you can see the actual size of each image by looking at the file size in the bottom of the player as shown below:

File Attachments: 

3xLOGIC-Aztech-Sample-Video.zip