The Chateau Secret – SMICT (Super Motion Image Compression Technology)

 It is no secret that the key to digital video is COMPRESSION. To illustrate why compression is so important one needs to analyze just one minute of full-colour video recording. Without compression this would require a minimum of 1.66GB of storage space while transmission via a 56Kbps modem would exceed two and a half days!

This is completely unacceptable in today’s surveillance industry, which depends on permanent long-term storage of security information as well as the ability to review this information from a remote location.

All our competitors using compression technologies such as Wavelet, JPEG, MPEG and H.263 have to trade-off video quality for file size and/or frame rate. SMICT, however, is a compression technology which combines the use of a proprietary DSP chip (hardware) together with CPU software compression (based on redundancy and motion) to produce unparalleled compression ratios (up to 2400:1). This outperforms the widely used MPEG-4 technology by a factor of 8, with compression ratios scalable from 20:1 up to 300:1.

Utilizing an intelligent, non-linear super motion codec, SMICT analyzes the motion changes that occur within each frame, then eliminates the redundant portion of the image and compresses and stores only the change. To the end-user this means that a Chateau Digital Video Recorder is capable of recording 16-Channels of full-colour, 4CIF-size (704x576 pixels) images in true real time (25fps PAL) for up to 8 days with full-time recording on a 160GB hard drive. In comparison, a competitor recorder would, at most, record for just one day (24hr).

SMICT has almost identical characteristics to that of the theoretical compression standard named H.264.

The Best Just Got Better – H.264

 The theoretical H.264 standard is now a reality – thanks to Henry Liu, President of the Chateau Technical Corporation, the inventor of the superior SMICT technology and a pioneer of digital video and audio compression in the world arena. He has attained this standard, almost a year ahead of other runners, and is soon to release this technology in several guises – a PCI card for PC-based DVR’s, an embedded recorder and a mobile “playbox” for video recording on the move.