frame of video

Terms from Artificial Intelligence: humans at the heart of algorithms

The glossary is being gradually proof checked, but currently has many typos and misspellings.

A video can be seen as comprising a series of still images called frames. In celloloid filmography, these were literally separate transparencies on the film reel, but now are stored digitally and often compressed so that each still frame has to be decoded from the file format. If you view a single frame it can often look blurred or indistinct, but our eyes interpret the moving image so that the quality when played may be better than each still on their own – compression algorithms exploit these visual properties to enable higher compression without loss of perceived quality.

Used in Chap. 9: page 125; Chap. 12: pages 186, 187

Filmstrip of Butterfly Dance (ca. 1895), an early Kinetoscope film produced by Thomas Edison. (Source: Annabelle Whitford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)