ONVIF Profile M is the latest standard from ONVIF, designed to allow a vendor-agnostic way of passing analytics events and metadata between devices and VMS. Many new cameras coming to the market now include analytic capabilities (e.g. object detection, ANPR, facial recognition) and expose those through the new ONVIF Profile M standard.

The EdgeVis encoder now simplifies your video and analytics use cases by directly supporting the new ONVIF Profile M protocol. This removes the need for complex VPN setups by creating both a single video and analytics bridge between your camera and VMS.

The following diagram shows how the ONVIF Profile S video and ONVIF Profile M get from the IP Cameras to the third-party VMS.

The top line shows the standard EdgeVis video transfer, where the ONVIF Profile S video from the IP cameras is encoded into EdgeVis Video for transfer and then decoded back into ONVIF Profile S for delivery to the third-party VMS (via VMS Gateway).

The bottom line shows the new ONVIF Profile M analytics stream coming from the cameras, passing through the EdgeVis pipeline and onto the third-party VMS.

Both data streams are integrated and transmitted over the single EdgeVis stream and take advantage of the standard EdgeVis encryption and security mechanisms.

There are currently two VMS that have support for ONVIF Profile M. While most VMS can perform actions based on a trigger from an IP camera, only these VMS can perform additional operations based on the enhanced metadata from ONVIF Profile M analytics.

This is an evolving market as more VMS providers and so you may discover others who have introduced support for ONVIF Profile after the time of publication of this article (October 2024).

Our current recommendation is to use Milestone XProtect if you wish to make the best use of the metadata from your ONVIF Profile M camera.

This is a rapidly evolving market and many new IP cameras are adding support for ONVIF Profile M video analytics.

Digital Barriers have tested the following cameras as part of this solution:

However many more models are available - Digital Barriers can only provide support for cameras that are officially compliant and registered with ONVIF. We strongly recommend checking your desired camera is ONVIF Profile M compliant with the official search tool.

The following instructions outline the steps you must take:

The first two steps are independent of your chosen VMS - follow this article for guidance on how to get your encoder and VMS Gateway ready for your VMS to accept your meta-data.

There are also general guidance notes within the above article for ensuring the best performance of the system.

Once your encoder has been added to VMS Gateway and has been added to a Virtual ONVIF Device, you are ready to add it to Milestone: