Abstract: A multi-level elimination algorithm for fast motion estimation is proposed in this paper. The most matched block of the current block is detected in the next frame with a multi-level elimination strategy in this algorithm. In the first level, some candidate blocks are eliminated by simple characters based blockmatching, needing only very few computation costs. Then in further levels, more detailed characters are used for block-matching to eliminate more candidate blocks until the most matched block is selected in the last level. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can work steadily and get very close performance to the full-search algorithm while a computation reduction of about 12~14 times, with respect to the full-search algorithm.