Inter frame

An inter frame is a video compression technique that encodes a frame by referring to one or more neighboring frames rather than storing its full image data independently. The method exploits temporal redundancy: because consecutive frames in a video sequence are usually very similar, an encoder can search a previously coded reference frame for blocks of pixels that closely match the current frame, then record only a motion vector describing how that block has shifted along with a small residual correcting any remaining difference. This produces a far smaller amount of data than encoding every pixel from scratch, which is what an intra frame does. Inter frame coding is a core part of common video formats and standards including MPEG and H.264, where frames are typically organized into groups that mix occasional intra frames, used as anchors, with many more inter frames that reference them or each other, balancing compression efficiency against resilience to transmission errors and the ability to seek within a stream.