Motion compensation

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,^[1][2] known as block motion compensation (BMC) or motion-compensated DCT (MC DCT).