interframe coding - technical definition

In video compression, the coding of the differences between frames. Interframe coding often provides substantial compression because in many motion sequences, only a small percentage of the pixels are actually different from one frame to another. However, it depends entirely on the content. A room full of people dancing will not compress as well as a person sitting in a chair talking.

With interframe coding, a video sequence is made up of keyframes that contain the entire image. In between the keyframes are delta frames, which are encoded with only the incremental differences. Depending on the compression method, a new keyframe is generated based on a set number of frames or when a certain percentage of pixels in the material has changed. See intraframe coding.