We have studied on the 2-D moving target tracking algorithm satisfying a real-time hardware implementation requirement. In this paper, a fast algorithm is developed based on the operator formulation and the variational algorithm f 10] . Here, we use the directed search for the maximum of the cross-correlation in order to obtain an initial estimate for the variational algorithm and decompose the scene into 16 smaller subblocks and apply the variational algorithm to each subblock sequentially with a new moving area detection method. We call the algorithm subblock based recursive algorithm. Compared with (10) , the ratio of the computational savings obtained from the proposed algorithm is 7 on the average.