Axis introduces ARTPEC-2 - opening up for next generation video products

Axis Communications has finalized the development of its new hardware and software platforms, which will be the basis for the company's next generation video products. The new video chip, ARTPEC-2, and a new modularized design platform enable Axis to increase flexibility and efficiency in product development and reduce time to market. Besides a broad range of added functionality, customers will benefit from products with significantly higher performance.

Since Axis introduced the world's first network camera in 1996, the company has held both market and technology leading positions in the network video industry. The introduction of the new video compression chip means yet another significant market advantage in the Video product area for Axis. With a growing demand for IP-based video systems for security surveillance and remote monitoring applications, requirements for user-friendliness and the ability to customize applications are increasing quickly. With the new chip and design platform, Axis will be able to further increase the flexibility in its product portfolio, adding more customized high performance video products meeting the toughest quality requirements. "The finalization of ARTPEC-2 and our new video design platform marks an important milestone for Axis. With these innovations we further strengthen our leadership in the network video market. Besides the improved ability to design new products faster and at a lower cost, we can increase the performance levels of our video products even further, bringing our offering yet another step beyond our competitors", said Axis' CEO Ray Mauritsson. "We will start introducing the first products based on our next generation video technology already next month". Key benefits of the powerful new video chip, ARTPEC-2, are; superior image quality, support for a range of CCD and CMOS sensors ranging from VGA to Megapixel resolutions and built-in functionality for sharpening, backlight compensation, noise reduction and white balance. On the video and image compression side, key benefits attained through the new technology are; support for multiple Motion-JPEG streams, support for MPEG-4 part 2, up to 30 frames/second from 4 simultaneous video sources and real-time compression of up to 45 Megapixels/second. All in all, this heavily improves video quality and bandwidth efficiency as well as user flexibility.