This paper proposes a fast statistical approach to recover lost motion vectors in H.264 video coding standard. Unlike other video coding standards, the motion vectors of H.264 cover smaller area of the video frame being encoded. This leads to a strong correlation between neighboring motion vectors, thus making H.264 standard amenable for statistical analysis to recover the lost motion vectors. This paper proposes a Pearson Correlation Coefficient based matching algorithm that speeds up the recovery of lost motion vectors with very less compromise in visual quality of the recovered video. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that employs correlation coefficient for motion vector recovery. Experimental results obtained by employing the proposed algorithm on standard benchmark video sequences show that they yield comparable quality of recovered video with significantly less computation than the best reported in the literature, thus making it suitable for real-time applications. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.