Effect of additional compression features on h.264 surveillance video

Abstract: In video surveillance business, a recurring topic of discussion is quality versus data usage. A higher quality allows for more details to be captured at the cost of a higher bit rate, and for cameras monitoring events 24 hours a day, limiting data usage can quickly become a factor to consider. The purpose of this thesis has been to apply additional compression features to a h.264 video steam, and evaluate their effects on the videos overall quality. Using a surveillance camera, recordings of video streams were obtained. These recordings had constant GOP and frame rates. By breaking down one of these videos to an image sequence, it was possible to encode the image sequence into video streams with variable GOP/FPS using the software Ffmpeg. Additionally a user test was performed on these video streams, following the DSCQS standard from the ITU-R recom- mendation. The participants had to subjectively determine the quality of video streams. The results from the these tests showed that the participants did not no- tice any considerable difference in quality between the normal videos and the videos with variable GOP/FPS. Based of these results, the thesis has shown that that additional compression features can be applied to h.264 surveillance streams, without having a substantial effect on the video streams overall quality.