Abstract: Motion estimation is the science of predicting the current frame in a video sequence from the past frame (or frames), by slicing it into rectangular blocks of pixels, and matching these to past such blocks. The displacement in the spatial position of the block in the current frame with respect to the past frame is called the motion vector. This method of temporally decorrelating the video sequence by finding the best matching blocks from past reference frames—motion estimation—makes up about 80% or more of the computation in a video encoder. In this patent disclosure, we define a method of searching only a very sparse subset of possible displacement positions (or motion vectors) among all possible ones, to see if we can get a good enough match, and terminate early. This sparse subset of motion vectors is preselected using prior knowledge and extensive testing on video sequences.