A new feature-based motion parameter estimation for arbitrary-shaped regions is proposed. Existing motion parameter estimation algorithms such as gradient-based algorithm require iterations that are very sensitive to initial values and which often converge to a local minimum. In this paper, the motion parameters of an object are obtained by solving a set of linear equations derived by the motion of salient feature points of the object. In order to estimate the displacement of the feature points, a new process called the "bi-directional correspondence scheme" is proposed to ensure the robjstness of correspondence. The proposed correspondence scheme iteratively selects the feature points and their corresponding points until unique one-to-one correspondence is established. Furthermore, initially obtained motion paramerters are refined using an iterative method to give a better performance. The proposed algorithm can be used for motion estimationin object-based image coder, and the experimental resuls show that the proposed method outperforms existing schemes schemes in estimating motion parameters of objects in image sequences.sequences.