singleframe

Singleframe is a term used to describe a single still image within a sequence or as a standalone photograph. It is used across disciplines such as photography, film, video processing, and computer vision to refer to one discrete frame of data, as opposed to multiple frames that constitute motion or animation.

In film and video, a single frame can be encoded or decoded independently; such frames are often called key frames or intra-coded frames (I-frames) in compressed video streams. In still photography, a single frame simply means one exposure captured at a moment in time.

Applications include extracting frames from video to create thumbnails, storyboarding, or stop-motion animation; archival and forensic analysis; and the baselines for machine learning where models are evaluated on single-frame images rather than sequences. Single-frame analysis is also used in quality control, where a lone image is assessed for defects without considering temporal changes.

Limitations of single-frame data include the lack of temporal information that is inherent in video, reduced context for interpreting motion, and potential susceptibility to compression artifacts. In imaging workflows, frame extraction must preserve important attributes such as aspect ratio and color space, and metadata should be maintained to provide temporal or contextual information when needed.

See also: still image, frame rate, keyframe, I-frame, frame extraction, stop-motion, thumbnail.