SmartCapture: a compact video capture, encoding and streaming technology for UAVs
Wei Dai, Pankaj Topiwala · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Live surveillance video is increasingly in demand on the battlefield to achieve Information Dominance, a critical DoD doctrine established long ago. With the increasing data transmit rate and range of the wireless device and development of Multi-hop Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANet), real-time live video streaming from UAVs to the ground stations will move forward rapidly. UAVs of every size and shape are currently being formulated and fielded at breathtaking pace, some of them no bigger than paper planes. State-of-the-art video compression and transmission technology will be needed to achieve real-time transmission of the on-board sensors. This paper demonstrates a highly compact video capture and encoding technology for UAVs - SmartCapture. FastVDO SmartCapture is an USB-based capture and encoder device, which ingests NTSC/PAL analog audio/video, and outputs compressed MP4-formatted multimedia via USB 2.0. The captured video/audio is compressed using H.264/AAC, today's leading commercial standards. The highly compressed bit streams make live video streaming possible.