The present invention relates to a movement estimation method and a device for compressing movement images by block match, wherein resolution of input image frames is orderly reduced to respectively form layers 0, 1 and 2; three search regions are determined in the layer 1 according to the mean absolute deviation (MAD) corresponding to a search region of the layer 2 and the relation of adjacent blocks of the current block; a search region is selected in the layer 0 according to the MAD corresponding to each search region in the layer 1; the final movement vector is determined according to the distance of the minimum position and the origin point of the MAD corresponding to the search region in the layer 0. Compared with the whole block match analysis (FSBMA), the present invention obviously reduces the complexity and rapidly implements the movement estimation.