Patent ID: 8270490

Claim:
An apparatus operable to detect a motion vector in a plurality of search layers having different block sizes from a higher search layer to a lower search layer using image data to be encoded and a plurality of reference image data, the apparatus comprising: a motion vector detection unit configured to determine second image data corresponding to a first block size in first reference image data of the plurality of reference image data, which has a smallest first matching error with first image data corresponding to the first block size in the image data to be encoded, and to detect a first motion vector based on the first image data and the second image data; a first extraction unit configured to divide the first image data into a plurality of third image data corresponding to a second block size smaller than the first block size, and to extract a plurality of second matching errors corresponding to the plurality of third image data from the first matching error; and a first determination unit configured to determine whether to detect the motion vector using a third block size of a search layer lower than a search layer having the first block size, based on the plurality of second matching errors extracted by the first extraction unit.