1. A method of motion estimation for portions of images of an image sequence, comprising: receiving a current image, which is from a temporal video image sequence; determining a block of pixels from the current image, for which motion is to be estimated; determining a search area within a reference image; sampling pixels of the reference image within the search area according to a sampling pattern comprising subsampling the pixels within the search area of the reference image in one or more of a horizontal and a vertical direction at a subsampling rate positively correlated to an amount of motion of the block of pixels in that direction; storing the subsampled pixels of the reference image in a non-transitory medium; determining a motion vector for the block of pixels from the current image by retrieving at least some of the subsampled pixels of the reference image from the non-transitory medium, and identifying, within the search area, a match between the block of pixels from the current image, and a block of pixels within the search area.