Does the video surveillance industry really need yet another compression standard?
There have been many compressions standards for the video surveillance industry over the years: Motion JPEG (M-JPEG), H.263, H.261, MPEG-2, JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4. Of those, M-JPEG has been very popular, despite the shortcoming with the creation of large data files. MPEG-4 has also gained wide acceptance but has been so bastardized that when different vendors say that their products use MPEG-4, they all mean something different. Not only does this confuse the end-user, but it creates compatibility issues between components. Additionally, if the image contains a lot of motion, the bandwidth is almost the same as M-JPEG. MPEG-2 lacks flexibility in adjusting frame rates and bit rates; and H.261/263 do not have enough image quality for video surveillance applications, as they are geared toward teleconferencing.
