Surveillance performance index

Surveillance Performance Index (SPI) is a benchmarking system that is used to rate IP-based security systems for a particular bandwidth or computational load.

SPI (version 1.0) is defined as the number of 10 million pixels per second units of an average video frame using MJPEG compression that can be passed through a specific device or subsystem.

Any component of a computer system can carry an SPI rating, for network or other bandwidth only devices it is a simple conversion process from bandwidth to SPI. For CPU or other computational devices, a closed, undocumented, benchmark is used. The most common areas of an IP camera server that to use an SPI rating are the CPU, Network card or interface device, and RAID Subsystem.

SPI development is to allow engineers and end users to make direct comparisons, design, build and be able to expand an IP based camera security system without complex benchmarking or in-depth knowledge of the hardware being used.