Design of multi-threaded real time embedded video acquisition system from IP cameras

IP cameras have become the de facto imaging sensor used for video acquisition in surveillance systems because of its advantages over traditional analog cameras. Video Compression schemes are adopted for efficient transmission and bandwidth preservation of the link. Currently H.264 is the compression standard adopted for video compression in these devices. Logging of the videos from the imaging sensors is the fundamental responsibility of these surveillance systems. This paper presents an efficient method for the multi threaded acquisition of H.264 encoded video stream from these imaging sensors. An embedded implementation of the proposed method have also been carried out on an ARM Cortex A8 target. The embedded system developed possesses the capability of acquiring compressed video streams concurrently from 4 IP Cameras while handling the real time processing constraints.