Frameproviding

Frameproviding refers to the role of a software component that emits discrete, time-ordered units of data known as frames to downstream consumers. Frames are commonly used in video and image processing, robotics, and simulation, and each frame typically carries a payload (such as an image or sensor reading) plus metadata such as a timestamp, frame number, and duration.

In a frame-based pipeline, a frame provider may operate in push mode (streaming frames to registered listeners) or pull mode (satisfying consumer requests). Implementations often employ buffering, queues, or ring buffers to smooth differences in processing rates. Frame boundaries and timestamps are essential for synchronization across multiple sources or processing stages.

Challenges include maintaining real-time constraints, handling frame drops, jitter, and latency; ensuring thread safety; coordinating frame rates when multiple sources are involved; and dealing with backpressure when consumers cannot keep up.

Contexts: video capture and transcoding pipelines (GStreamer, FFmpeg), robotics perception stacks, simulation and game engines, and data logging systems. Examples include a camera frame provider in a ROS pipeline supplying camera frames to a computer vision node, or a rendering loop providing frames to a display sink.

Relation to other terms: frame sink (consumer), frame stream, and frame producer are used to describe the opposite ends. The term is descriptive and used across frameworks rather than formal standard.