OIS and EIS of Zoom Block Cameras

Introduction

Stabilization of digital action cameras is mature, but not in CCTV camera lens. There are two different approaches to to reduce that shaky-cam effect.
Optical image stabilization use complex hardware mechanisms inside a lens to keep the image still and enable a sharp capture. It’s been around for a long time in consumer electronics, but has not been widely adopted in CCTV lens.

Electronic image stabilization is more of a software trick, actively selecting the correct part of an image on a sensor to make it seem like the subject and the camera are moving less.

Let’s take a look at how both of them work, and how they’re being applied in CCTV.

Optical Image Stabilization

Optical image stabilization, referred to as OIS for short ,is based on optical stabilization lens, with automatic control PID algorithm. A camera lens with optical image stabilization has an internal motor that physically moves one or more of the glass elements inside the lens as the camera moving. This results in a stabilizing effect, countering the motion of the lens and the camera (from the shaking of the operator’s hands or effect of the wind, for example) and allowing a sharper, less-blurry image to be recorded.

A camera with a lens featuring optical image stabilization can capture clearer still images at lower light levels than one without.

The big downside is that optical image stabilization requires a lot of extra components in a lens, and OIS-equipped cameras and lenses are much more expensive than less complex designs.

For this reason, OIS has not mature application in CCTV zoom block cameras.

Electronic Image Stabilization

Electronic Image Stabilization is always called EIS for shortly. EIS is mainly realized by software, has nothing to do with the lens. To stabilize a shaky video, the camera can crop out the sections that does not looking moving on each frame and electronics zoom in the crop area. The crop of each frame of the image is adjusted to compensate for the shaking, and you see a smooth track of video.

There are two methods to detect the moving sections.the one use g-sensor, the another use software-only image detection.

The more you zoom in, the lower the quality of the final video will be.

In CCTV camera, the two methods is not too good because of the limited resources such as frame rate or resolution of the on-chip system. So, when you turn on EIS, it is only valid for lower vibrations.

Our Solution

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