Page 146 - Security Today, March 2017

GOOD TO GREAT: EXTREME EDITION
Think about how far we’ve come in image quality for security cameras. Not just from the very old days of single cameras and video tape, but even the big advancements from 10-20 years ago. You know, like the ones shown in reruns of “Law and Order” episodes, where the image was too grainy or blurry to identify the perp or his vehicle. The technology we have now is much clearer, much sharper, and with a lot more detail. It’s good. In fact, with the introduction of the H.265 platform, it’s great.
H.265, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is the video compression standard successor to the widely used H.264 (AVC). In comparison H.265
offers about double the data compression ratio at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD.
In most ways, H.265 is an extension of the concepts in H.264. The primary changes include the expansion of the pattern comparison and difference-coding areas from 16×16 pixel to sizes up to 64×64, improved variable-block-size segmentation, improved “intra” prediction within the same picture, improved motion vector prediction and motion region merging, improved motion compensation filtering, and an additional filtering step called sample-adaptive offset filtering.