A fault-tolerant ONVIF protocol extension for seamless surveillance video stream recording

ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) is an importance industrial standard for the video surveillance field. There are over 8000 ONVIF-compliant IP cameras (i.e., ONVIF NVT) and network video recorders (i.e., ONVIF NVS) from various vendors listed on the ONVIF official website. However, because the current ONVIF specifications do not support any fault-tolerant functions to handle NVS failure, in this paper we propose a fault-tolerant solution for ONVIF NVS and try to minimize the modifications to the current ONVIF specifications in the proposed design. Besides, we also propose an extension to the ONVIF NVT for preventing the loss of captured NVT video data during the failover procedure triggered by NVS failure. Finally, we evaluate the following four performance metrics of the proposed fault-tolerant ONVIF surveillance system: the maximal video local cache time supported by an NVT, the response time for accessing an ONVIF web service, the interrupt duration of video recording due to NVS failure, and the live video black out time observed by a video management system. Since the experimental results are all within the acceptable range for a real fault-tolerant video surveillance system in the real world, the experiences provided by this paper is a good reference for improving the fault-tolerant capabilities of the ONVIF video surveillance systems.