Patent ID: 8305500

Claim:
A method of block-based motion estimation, comprising: providing a reference frame and a current frame, the current frame being divided into a plurality of non-overlapping macroblocks (MBs); obtaining a motion vector map by obtaining a motion vector of each said MB in the current frame with respect to the reference frame; and determining the motion vector of each MB in an interpolated frame between the reference frame and the current frame according to the motion vector map; wherein the step of determining the motion vector of each said MB in the interpolated frame comprises the steps of: generating a plurality of inverse-mapped MBs in the interpolated frame by inversely mapping the MBs in the current frame to the interpolated frame according to the motion vector map; respectively determining a plurality of distances between the inverse-mapped MBs and a processed MB in the interpolated frame; and determining the motion vector of the processed MB by selecting one of the motion vectors from the motion vector map according to the distances.