An adaptive motion estimation algorithm was proposed based on enhanced bit-plane.Firstly,8 enhanced bit-planes were decomposed from the original gray image,all the motion vectors were acquired from the 3rd bit-plane,and the correlation criterion only contained boolean operations.Then the initial search point and 2 search strategies were adaptively chosen according to the motion vector field,and an threshold was also selected to detect stationary blocks.Experimental results show that with similar accuracy performance,a speed improvement rate of the proposed algorithm over the full search can be over 95%.