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Concept
Motion compensation
Summary
Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video data for video compression, for example in the generation of MPEG-2 files. Motion compensation describes a picture in terms of the transformation of a reference picture to the current picture. The reference picture may be previous in time or even from the future. When images can be accurately synthesized from previously transmitted/stored images, the compression efficiency can be improved.
Motion compensation is one of the two key video compression techniques used in video coding standards, along with the discrete cosine transform (DCT). Most video coding standards, such as the H.26x and MPEG formats, typically use motion-compensated DCT hybrid coding, known as block motion compensation (BMC) or motion-compensated DCT (MC DCT).
Motion compensation exploits the fact that, often, for many frames of a movie, the only difference between one frame and another is the result of either the camera moving or an object in the frame moving. In reference to a video file, this means much of the information that represents one frame will be the same as the information used in the next frame.
Using motion compensation, a video stream will contain some full (reference) frames; then the only information stored for the frames in between would be the information needed to transform the previous frame into the next frame.
The following is a simplistic illustrated explanation of how motion compensation works. Two successive frames were captured from the movie Elephants Dream. As can be seen from the images, the bottom (motion compensated) difference between two frames contains significantly less detail than the prior images, and thus compresses much better than the rest. Thus the information that is required to encode compensated frame will be much smaller than with the difference frame.
Official source
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