What Is ONVIF？

ONVIF (the Open Network Video Interface Forum) is a global and open industry forum with the goal of facilitating the development and use of a global open standard for the interface of physical IP-based security products. ONVIF creates a standard for how IP products within video surveillance and other physical security areas can communicate with each other. ONVIF is an organization started in 2008 by Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems and Sony.It was officially incorporated as a non-profit, 501(c)6 Delaware corporation on November 25, 2008. ONVIF membership is open to manufacturers, software developers, consultants, system integrators, end users and other interest groups that wish to participate in the activities of ONVIF. The ONVIF specification aims to achieve interoperability between network video products regardless of manufacturer.

The cornerstones of ONVIF are:
● Standardization of communication between IP-based physical security products
● Interoperability regardless of the brand
● Open to all companies and organizations

Members
To accommodate individual choices of participation, ONVIF offers four levels of membership: user, contributing, observer and full member. Full or contributing members can actively influence the development of the standard by participating in the work of the forum. The user and observer member levels are open to organizations that wish to use the network interface specification and have access to specification proposals but do not want to participate in any work of the forum. Technology and test tools are available to all ONVIF members to facilitate the development of conformant products.

In December 2009, the ONVIF member base had grown to 103 members. This comprised 12 full members, 13 contributing members and 78 user members.In December 2010, the forum had more than 240 members and more than 440 conformant products on the market.By January 2015, this had grown to more than 3,700 ONVIF conformant products and 500 members.By August 2016, this had grown to more than 6,900 conformant products on the market but shrunk to 461 members.In February 2020, ONVIF reached more than 14,000 conformant products.

Benefit of an open standard

ONVIF states the benefits of an open standards include:
● Interoperability – products from various manufacturers can be used in the same systems and “speak the same language”.
● Flexibility – end-users and integrators are not locked within proprietary solutions based on technology choices of individual manufacturers.
● Future-proof – standards ensure that there are interoperable products on the market, no matter what happens to individual companies.
● Quality – when a product conforms to a standard, the market knows what to expect from that product.

Specification
The ONVIF Core Specification aims to standardize the network interface (on the network layer) of network video products.It defines a network video communication framework based on relevant IETF and Web Services standards including security and IP configuration requirements. The following areas are covered by the Core Specification version 1.0:

● IP configuration
● Device discovery
● Device management
● Media configuration
● Real time viewing
● Event handling
● PTZ camera control
● Video analytics
● Security

ONVIF utilizes IT industry technologies including SOAP, RTP, and Motion JPEG, MPEG-4, and H.264 video codecs. Later releases of the ONVIF specification (version 2.0) also covers storage and additional aspects of analytics.

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