METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETECTING MOTION VECTORS

Motion vectors are obtained, using a known block matching technique which is based on a block-by-block processing between a current and a preceding frames. Whenever an equivalent value to the minimum absolute value of difference which has the earliest priority is found during the block matching, the closer of the two vectors derived therefrom to a predetermined motion vector is chosen. The closest vector which has survived the process of matching the search block from the current frame against its corresponding search region in the preceding frame is assigned as the motion vector of the given block and stored in a vector memory as a predetermined motion vector to repeat the search process for a subsequent block in the current frame.