In signal processing, a frame is a contiguous segment of the signal that is isolated for analysis and processing. A signal is divided into frames by the application of [[window function]]s in a process called [[windowing]]. The length of the window function defines the length of the frame. In many frame-based algorithms, like the [[overlap-add]], the frames overlap. This means that in the process of windowing, each window overlaps the previous one and a signal sample can be used in more than one frame.