Abstract-We show how to compactly index video data to support fast motion detection queries. A query specifies a time interval T , a area A in the video and two thresholds v and p. The answer to a query is a list of timestamps in T where ≥ p% of A has changed by ≥ v values.Our results show that by building a small index, we can support queries with a speedup of two to three orders of magnitude compared to motion detection without an index. For high resolution video, the index size is about 20% of the compressed video size.