Motion vectors are extremely useful in compression — which is why they are used in MPEG. Motion vectors also have other useful potential applications — such as motion detection, object tracking, and even potential alternative encoding methods.

Motion vectors are not always as clean as we would like, and this results in potential problems in applying simple algorithms to them. However, the computational benefit of having them already in MPEG and not having to decode the MPEG file before analyzing it means that despite these problems, they could still be very useful