In this paper we propose an optimal and robust correlation technique for the local motion estimation purposes. It is based on the maximization of a statistical robust matching function, which is computed in the frequency domain and therefore can be implemented by fast transformation algorithms. We show that our method achieves a significant speed up and robustness over the full search block-matching algorithm. We also present a comparative performance analysis, which shows that the proposed method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art in correlation motion estimation.