A new and fast motion-estimation algorithm based on partial block distortion using sorted significant features including bit-plane and mean is proposed. The proposed algorithm can obtain relatively accurate motion vectors with a reduced computational load. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves its MSE performance very close to the full search method, while requiring only 6-8% of the computation needed by the full search. Furthermore, the performance of our method is better than other algorithms based on partial block distortion search.