Patent ID: 8068543

Claim:
A method for determining the reliability of a motion vector estimating motion of pixels in a current video frame relative to another video frame in a video sequence, comprising the steps of: receiving a motion vector representing a motion estimate; determining an error block based on the motion vector; generating a histogram from one or more elements of the error block; determining a measure of reliability of the motion vector based on the histogram of the error block; and wherein calculating an error block E x,y t based on a motion estimate, (vx, vy), and the blocks B x,y t and B x+vx,y+vy t−1 ; wherein B x,y t represents a block at location (x, y) in the current frame I t of size m×n pixels, and B x+vx,y+vy t−1 represents a block displaced from location (x, y) by (vx, vy) in the previous frame I t−1 of the same size; and wherein the error block E x,y t is calculated as: E x,y t ( i,j )= B x,y t ( i,j )− B x+vx,y+vy t−1 ( i,j ), where i=x,x+1, . . . ,x+m−1,j=y,y+1, . . . ,y+n−1.