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SDM
INDEPTH

Digital Video: This primer

How It Works
images are created,
and the advantages
digital has over
analog.

A nything digital in the CCTV market is popular now, will help you compare equipment equitably and realize
especially digital image recording products. In fact, nearly what’s possible and what isn’t in this field.
half the respondents to a 1997 SECURITY Magazine survey
indicated that they view digital storage as a strong Where Do Digital Images Come from?
emerging technology. More than one-fourth of An image starts as a group of light rays coming into a
respondents to a 1999 SECURITY Magazine survey said camera.The light rays meet a charge coupled device (CCD)
they plan to purchase a digital image storage system within element in the camera—a flat spread of sensors that
the next 12 months.Why all the attention? convert the light into charges and store the information.
Digital recording offers clear advantages, including These sensors are, on average, 640 picture elements wide
better-quality images, quick searches, continuous by 480 elements deep.
recording during playback, and the need for less physical The stored charges contain both color and black-and-
storage space for the media. (See “0-1, Here Comes white data (a composite image).To assemble an image you
When choosing a Digital” on page 77 of this issue.) can see, a digital video decoder must arrange the charge
digital recording The buzz at security trade shows recently has information into primary color channels—red, green, and
system, such as the been digital video image quality.There are claims of blue (RGB)—similar to what a television would do.
one pictured high-resolution—even broadcast-quality images Once the image is decoded into three channels,it is then
above, weigh the with extremely small storage sizes. Though digital converted by an analog-to-digital converter (A/D) in your
advantages and technology is quickly changing the way we gather digital video recorder into eight bit samples per color
disadvantages of and process images for security purposes, and channel.Three color channels times eight bits per channel
various though the quality claims sound appealing, how do equals 24 bits. Each set is referred to as a pixel (picture
compression you separate truth from fiction? element), and represents one dot painted on a color
techniques used by First, you want to be armed with the monitor screen (also called a cathode ray tube or CRT).
manufacturers. understanding of how a digital image is created.This In summary, cameras create composite images, and

August 1999 SDM/81

SDM
INDEPTH

Digital images may digital recorders decode these images into separated into 8 x 8 blocks of pixels. Each block is then
three color channels, and then digitize the assigned a number and coded.The software examines the
be sent anywhere image for storage on a computer hard drive blocks and decides which blocks are redundant and
or transmittal through a computer network. therefore not essential to creating the image.The program
in the world in transmits the blocks that are essential, which is a reduced
the blink of an number based on the level of compression required by the
Analog vs. Digital Images system settings. High compression rates in JPEG images
eye. Via world- Once the image has made the
transformation from analog to digital, many
mean more blocks are dropped out, which tends to result
in blocky-looking images with mosaic-like patterns.
wide networks, options are available that are not available Wavelet video compression, rather than operating on 8
for an analog image.Analog images only can x 8 pieces of the image, operates on the entire image.The
an image can be be displayed on a monitor,recorded to tape, transformation uses a series of filters that determines the
or perhaps printed on a video printer.Digital content of every pixel in the image. Each filter outputs a
sent within images may be sent anywhere in the world set of coefficients,which represents the result of that filter.
minutes of in the blink of an eye. Via worldwide Because Wavelet technology works on the entire image,
networks such as e-mail or interoffice there is no mosaic effect when the image is viewed. Both
capture. Intranets, an image can be sent within
minutes of capture.
Wavelet and JPEG produce “lossy” images, meaning they
have a loss of image information. However, with Wavelet
Digital images can be less expensive to print and easier technology, lossy effects are not apparent until one
to enhance, as well. Unlike analog images, digital images reaches very high compression rates/ratios.
can be printed on a low-cost,color ink-jet printer. For easy Wavelet technology also provides very efficient motion
enhancement, digital images may be imported into a detection. Because the system can compare the tiniest
software processing package, such as Adobe PhotoShop. piece of visual information to the same pixels in the
previous image,it can determine a change very accurately.
H.263 is a standard form of compression that is
Resolving the High-Resolution Question commonly used in video-teleconferencing applications.
The term high-resolution is often misused and This technology is very similar to JPEG, except that it only
misunderstood in the security industry. High-resolution transmits the pixels in each image that have changed from
can refer to spatial resolution (number of pixels per line) the last image, rather than full images. Because two
or the number of lines per frame. It also may mean the consecutive images from a camera are typically the same,
amount of color information in each pixel of the image. the H.263 standard capitalizes on this, and therefore
Most digital video equipment will digitize video at employs a frame-differencing technique,which sends only
either 640 x 480 pixels or 720 x 480 pixels. The amount the differences from one frame to the next.
of color information in each pixel will vary,but the systems The main downside to this scheme is that when the
with the highest resolution will digitize each pixel as 24- scene totally changes or the camera is switched, the data
bit RGB.This retains the full amount of color information rate immediately increases, and the resulting image is
possible in digital format. compromised. If you are not switching cameras, this is an
The digital video decoder that is used typically excellent choice for video compression.
determines digital image sizes.There are many types, but
the most popular formats convert images into 720 x 480 Compressed Advice
resolution. This size is best because it contains a larger In general, if you are interested in a digital time-lapse or
amount of data per image. An image with a 720 x 480 event recorder, look at Wavelet-based systems, because
resolution is greater than a 640 x 480 system. they are very good at digitizing and storing images from a
The total image size is determined, then, by multiplying multi-camera system.
the spatial resolution with color resolution. For example, However,Wavelet systems are less of a match if you need
a 720 x 480 image with 24-bit resolution (which is 3 bytes) a high-speed remote access system,because the images are
is 1,036,800 bits, or more than 1 MB—a fairly large image relatively large compared with an H.263-based system. If
size not suitable for digital surveillance. That’s why you are looking at a remote access system,then H.263 will
compression is so important. be a good choice for getting image motion over a standard
POTS (phone) line.H.263,however,will not produce high-
quality images that are suitable for recording. Obviously, a
Getting Compressed without Getting Depressed system that would perform Wavelet recording, while
In a typical digital video recorder, images are converted offering an H.263-like transmission scheme would be the
to digital, and then they are compressed. Compression ideal solution. SDM
processes the data in an image to squeeze the image into
a smaller space, for example, in your digital memory or The following contributed to this article: SECURITY
through a phone line. Magazine,“CCTV Equipment, Plans & Practices,” 1997;“CCTV
In today’s digital recorder market, there are three types Study,” 1999. Charlie Mannix, vice president of product
of compression: JPEG,Wavelet, and H.263. development, Integral Technologies, Indianapolis. Allan
JPEG is the oldest and most established scheme that Colombo, associate editor, SDM Magazine.
currently exists. In JPEG compression, the digital image is

82/SDM August 1999