Motion estimation is one of the key components for high quality video coding. In this paper, a new motion estimation scheme for MPEG-like video coder is suggested. The proposed temporally adaptive motion estimation scheme consists of five functional blocks: Temporal subband analysis (TSBA), extraction of temporal information, scene change detection (SCD), picture type replacement (PTR), and temporally adapted block matching algorithm (TABMA). Here all the functional components are based on the temporal subband analysis. In this papre, we applied the analysis part of subband decompostion to the temporal axis of moving picture sequence, newly defined the temporal activity distribution (TAD) and average TAD, and proposed the temporally adapted block matching algorithm, the scene change detection algorithm and picture type replacement algorithm which employed the results of the temporal subband analysis. A new block matching algorithm TABMA is capable of controlling the block matching area. According to the temporal activity distribution of objects, it allocates the search areas nonuniformly. The proposed SCD and PTR can prevent unavailable motion prediction for abrupt scene changes. Computer simulation results show that the proposed motion estimation scheme improve the quality of reconstructed sequence and reduces the number of block matching trials to 40% of the numbers of trials in conventional methods. The TSBA based scene change detection algorithm can detect the abruptly changed scenes in the intentionally combined sequence of this experiment without additional computations.