Onvif: Driving network video through global standardization

By Hugo García-Pardo, researcher

One of the most common needs of IP video developers and end users is a stable solution which allows them to connect old and new devices without additional costs, both for today’s purchases and tomorrow’s upgrades. Besides, they need to not be locked into using solutions from a single manufacturer. These are the main reasons why they require a standard in order to work out this situation.

Onvif is defined as a global standard for communication between network video devices. It was developed by Axis, Bosh and Sony in 2008. Currently, Onvif has a competitor called PSIA , but it seems Onvif is outpacing it, since more manufacturers are adopting it. Onvif devices implement web services, in order to retrieve information, configuration and notification among other tasks, using standard protocols.

Looking for standards

Besides features like communication’s standardization and device interoperability, Onvif stands as a costless tool for all companies and organizations. That’s whyit is a well suited solution for platform-independent development, since it is supported by the majority of the manufacturers.

Gradiant is adopting the Onvif standard in several on-going developments in the field of intelligent video surveillance. Using this new approach, Gradiant provides an important interoperability tool to all these projects, supporting more types of devices and consequently increasing their capabilities. Currently, Gradiant is already provinding Onvif-compliant commercial solutions which take advantage of its benefits, and will continue to deepen further into Onvif in future projects.