12/17/2018 IP Camera Protocols: PSIA ONVIF CGI ISAPI

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Blog (/blog/) IP Video Surveillance (/blog/ip-video-surveillance/) IP Camera Protocols: PSIA ONVIF CGI ISAPI

IP Video Surveillance

IP CAMERA PROTOCOLS: PSIA ONVIF CGI ISAPI

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Unifore Security | October 15,2016-2:05 PM

Based on HIS Markit research and investigation, over 66 million network cameras will be shipped globally, greatly outpace the
shipment of HD CCTV cameras (http://www.hkvstar.com/technology-news/4k-ahd-cvi-tvi-cameras-are-not-yet-to-come.html) (28
million). Although the growth becomes slower than past years due to the global gloomy economy and the aggressive price
competition, the market research company forecasts that the world market for video surveillance will grow by over 7% in 2016. 

Apparently, the maturing network camera standard and protocols make a great contribution to the fast development and market
growth of IP surveillance products. PSIA and ONVIF are two major standards/protocols that universally adopted by IP surveillance
products. On one hand, these standards has reduced the cost and complexity of IP video surveillance, also solved the
interoperatability between different network devices.

Back to 2009, Ajit Dubey, senior project manager of the Embedded System Group wrote that Interoperability was a key challenge
for security professionals managing PTZ, network con guration and legacy compatibility. While IP provided the bene ts of
connectivity, wider uptake faced a number of challenges. Manufacturers had a selection of video coding standards, which each
had different pro les. There was more fragmentation in streaming protocols, storage formats and video analytics. Con guring
PTZ functionality was also di cult between third-party video devices. 

1#. What’s PSIA?

PSIA, its full name is Physical Security Interoperability Alliance, it was formed in 2008 with mission to create standards-based
interfaces for physical security hardware and software platforms. The alliance pursue the goal of bringing interoperability to
network based security systems. This alliance has more than 50 physical security manufacturers and system integrator such as
Honywell, Tyco, United Technologies, Milestone, Allegion etc. 

2#. What’s ONVIF?

ONVIF also founed in 2008, ONVIF is the abbreviation of open network video interface forum, it’s an open organization led by Sony,
Axis, Bosch. After 8 years development, the ONVIF becomes the universal standard intending to solve the connection and
interopratebility problems between different IP based security products. The organization currently has Pro le S, Pro le C, Pro le
G, Pro le Q (http://www.hkvstar.com/technology-news/ip-camera-standard-protocol-onvif.html) etc different speci cations
dedicated to different applications. More than 1000 manufacturers joined the ONVIF membership. 

As we previously mentioned, PSIA and ONVIF are main standards being used by different IP security products. However, ONVIF
owns the largest group of manufacturers, there are millions products are compliant with ONVIF products, among them about
5000 products are certi ed by ONVIF. It seems PSIA will be phased out because lacking the support by manufacturers. However,
some companies such as Hikvision (/tag/36-hikvision.html) providing the products are compliant with both ONVIF and PSIA
standards. 

3#. What’s difference between PSIA and ONVIF?

Since both standards share the same mission and goal.  Not only manufacturers and integrator seem to be suffering from
indecision, many users don’t know the difference between them.

According to the article written by Ajit Dubey, PSIA had de ned speci cations which were more general for the broader physical
security market including access control, storage and more. While the ONVIF seems to concentrate on IP video streaming,
particularly network cameras and video analytics. So, the ONVIF made the speci cation intending to solve the interface problem
of video stream transceiver. The speci cation criteria includes device discovery, device con guration, events, PTZ control, video
analytics, push noti cation and video streaming etc functions.

Ajit Dubey also listed the technology differences between ONVIF and PSIA, which may drive the adoption of standards in the IP
surveillance market.
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12/17/2018 IP Camera Protocols: PSIA ONVIF CGI ISAPI

1. PSIA uses the representational state transfer (REST) architecture. On the other side, the ONVIF speci cation is built upon open
platform web service standards such as XML (for data description syntax), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP, SOAP 1.2) to
transfer message and WSDL to describe the services. Almost all Web services are using REST today, it’s simple to use compared
to SOAP and only requires less overhead than SOAP. 

2. ONVIF can provide 100-percent interoperability between compliant products as far as device discovery is concerned, this dues
to using the Microsoft-centric technology (WS Discovery) for its device discovery mechanism. This means all ONVIF compliant
network devices must adopt the WS Discovery method. 

PSIA offers several different mechanisms for device discovery, including Bonjour, uPnP, Zeroconf . While PSIA provides more
exibility to adopt mechanisms for device discovery, However, this also leads to complexity in interoperability for connecting PSIA-
compliant products. E.g, a PSIA-compliant camera supporting Bonjour cannot be connected with a PSIA-compliant video
management system supporting UPnP, despite both the camera and video management system being PSIA-compliant. 

3. PSIA can not provide 100 percent interoperability for PSIA speci cations compared to ONVIF speci cations. The reason is PSIA
uses generalized message format for event and noti cations, while the ONVIF’s event noti cation is based on the WS-Notify
framework.

4. PSIA provides an easy interface for analytics integration compared to rigid ONVIF speci cations.

5. Due to its REST-based architecture, PSIA's implementation is lightweight compared to ONVIF's SOAP-based architecture
implementation.

4#. What's CGI and ISAPI?

Except above mentioned two main standards, some manufacturers produce the IP cameras (/category/super-hd-series.html)
support CGI and ISAPI. Both CGI and ISAPI are used for web development. CGI, that's common gateway interface typically runs on
Linux OS, it's a script running on server to interact with client's HTML webpage. CGI is the one of important WWW technologies, it
performs as a bridge to link the application program (CGI program) and web server. It's also a speci cation to transfer messages
between program and web server. By contrast, ISAPI is an N-tier API of Internet Information Services (IIS) runs on Windows OS.
The ISAPI is the abbreviation of Internet Server Application Programming Interface.

When using the CGI protocol, the users can type the commands: http://{ipaddress}:{port)/snapshot.cgi?
user=admin&pwd=password to con g the snapshot setting. Typically, the IP camera manufacturers will provide users a document
to list all the CGI commands that the IP camera can support. Other network cameras may support the ISAPI, users can use the
commands such as http://{ipaddress}:{port)/snapshoot.exe?user=admin&pwd=password or http://{ipaddress}:
{port)/snapshoot.dll?user=admin&pwd=password to access the camera's snapshot setting. 

Obviously, by using the CGI and ISAPI, the camera can provide much more exibility to users, especially when they want to achieve
certain function based on their exclusive requirement or integrate the camera to different security systems.

5#. WHAT'S GB/T28181 STANDARD?

Chinese government (Ministry of Public Security) released the GB/T28181 standard to the video surveillance market with purpose
to solve the monopoly of ONVIF. GB/T28181 is the code name for the <security video surveillance network system of information
transmission , switching, control technology requirements>, it's released dated back to 2012. Many Chinese network video
surveillance products support GB/T28181 standard along with ONVIF. Since it's a national standard to Chinese products, unlikely
this standard will be adopted globally. 

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COMMENTS (3) Add New

Anonymous Saturday, 02 September 2017

Great article, thanks!

Quote Reply

Anonymous Tuesday, 22 August 2017

Great article! Thanks

Quote Reply

James Friday, 06 January 2017

Great article. Looking for this article only thank you for detailed information and understanding the difference between PSIA and
ONVIF.<br><a href="www.in nova.com/ (http://www.in nova.com/)" rel="nofollow noopener">www.in nova.com/
(http://www.in nova.com/)</a>

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