Hangzhou, China, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Hundreds of millions of security cameras operate 24/7 around the world, and the industry-wide shift to HD and 4K+ resolutions, combined with expanded channel counts and long-term retention mandates, is driving explosive growth in video storage. Meanwhile, hard drive prices remain volatile and enterprise storage budgets continue to increase. Compounding this pressure, traditional encoding applies uniform compression to every pixel, treating sky backgrounds and important targets alike. Approximately 70% of video security footage consists of static or low-value scenes, so this one-size-fits-all approach wastes vast amounts of storage on unimportant content.
Whitepaper: How big-scale AI is driving the evolution of video encoding and enabling intelligent understanding
The next evolution will move beyond compression to AI-powered semantic analysis. Technologies such as Hikvision’s Guanlan Encoding leverage large-scale visual AI models to enable selective compression based on regions of interest (ROI). Important targets such as people and vehicles retain high-resolution detail, while static backgrounds are aggressively compressed, resulting in significant storage savings without sacrificing important information.
SourceSecurity.com and Hikvision have teamed up to release a new white paper exploring how intelligent video encoding powered by large-scale AI is redefining storage efficiency and video usability.
Key benefits of AI-powered video encoding at scale:
- 30-50% storage savings: For a project with 2,000 video channels (1080P @ 2Mbps) and 90 days of storage, Guanlan encoding reduces hard drive requirements by 50% (from 403 units to 202 units). This translates to 50% savings in hardware, rack space, and power costs, significantly reducing project costs without compromising efficiency.
- Preserve HD details: High-precision ROI segmentation preserves high-resolution details for dynamic objects such as people and vehicles, while static backgrounds undergo ultra-high compression to significantly reduce bitrate. In contrast, traditional compression treats the entire scene uniformly, often blurring important targets and degrading downstream AI analysis. Guanlan encoding eliminates this trade-off, keeping important details crisp and enabling true encoding on demand.
- Bandwidth optimization: By prioritizing important content, intelligent video understanding delivers HD quality video over SD bandwidth, reducing consumption during transmission and review. For remote viewing, users can access HD-level details using far less bandwidth than traditional streaming, ensuring important information is accessible even on constrained networks.
- Seamless deployment: Analog cameras connect directly to Guanlan Encoding DVR without replacement. New projects benefit from AI-enabled front-end cameras, while refurbishing back-end equipment for maximum cost efficiency.
Download the full white paper See how intelligent encoding moves video encoding from a one-size-fits-all solution to an intelligent, on-demand encoding approach.
Source Hikvision
