PROCESSING SEQUENTIAL VIDEO IMAGES TO DETECT IMAGE MOTION AMONG INTERLACED VIDEO FIELDS OR PROGRESSIVE VIDEO IMAGES

Video images are processed to detect image motion among sequential images (e.g., progressive non-interlaced images of a video signal and/or interlaced fields of a video signal), each image being represented using a plurality of pixels. Exemplary embodiments replace block-based motion estimation with pixel-based motion estimation. A correlation surface is generated for every pixel in a reference image, from which a motion vector and confidence metric (i.e., a measure of confidence in the accuracy of the motion vector) are extracted for each pixel.