Zoran has announced that its highly integrated COACH 12VS digital camera processor platform is available to qualified manufacturers of connected video surveillance cameras.

The COACH platform delivers an optimized image processing pipeline, low-light sensitivity, user differentiated applications, and a royalty-free, feature-rich development environment to the IP video surveillance world.

"The COACH 12VS product platform solves key problems for IP video surveillance camera manufacturers, including providing exceptional performance in low-light conditions and more efficient compression for network streaming to IP camera vendors. With this new platform, we are providing our customers a cost-effective solution that doesn't compromise performance," said Ohad Meitav, Vice President and General Manager, Zoran's Mobile division.

"The market for IP video surveillance cameras is expected to double from 5 million units in 2010 to more than 10 million units in 2013," according to Michelle Abraham, Principal Analyst at In-Stat.

Zoran's COACH processors power digital still and video camera models from the world's leading camera manufacturers including Casio, Cisco, Fujifilm, GE, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung, Sony, and Vivitar among others.

The COACH 12VS IP video surveillance development platform includes a flexible software architecture and all the necessary hardware and middleware required to enable manufacturers to develop differentiated products with shortened time-to-market. Specific features include:

H.264 multi-stream compression, up to 1080p@30 fps

--  Optimized image processing pipeline for video surveillance applications: wide dynamic range compression, noise reduction without erasing details; enabling better compression and better image quality without artifacts

--  Motion Compensated Temporal Filter reduces noise and improves low-light performance while eliminating blur due to object motion; enabling better image quality and higher H.264 compression ratio without artifacts

--  Powerful lens distortion correction unit eliminates a variety of distortions, such as chromatic aberration, lens shading and barrel/pincushion geometric distortions; enabling the use of more     affordable lenses, including wide-angle and fish-eye

--  Dual-core MIPS architecture provides powerful processing power for additional software applications enabling further vendor differentiation

The Platform includes fully tuned specialty sensors over a full range of lighting conditions taking advantage of the COACH processor's best-in-class imaging pipeline. The royalty-free COACH 12VS platform, based on proven ThreadX Real-Time Operating System and Interniche's embedded networking suite, offers exceptional real-time performance for video streaming while minimizing memory footprint and network latency. The Software Development Kit provides a flexible software architecture allowing camera manufacturers to easily integrate differentiating features and shorten time-to-market for new IP video surveillance cameras.

The COACH-12VS solution is currently sampling to qualified customers and first products are expected to ship in volume in Q1 2011.