In this paper, we propose fast block matching criteria to reduce the implementation complexity of motion estimation in VLSI video coders. Based on generalized quantization of pixel difference measures, the block matching criteria combined with bitmap exclusive-OR (XOR) concept can be realized by short length adders and a multi-input binary counter. The proposed approach can be treated as a generalization of the pixel difference classification (PDC) criterion. Simulation results show that the proposed block-matching criteria along with various block search algorithms achieve better results than the PDC and obtain nearly the same performance as the mean absolute difference (MAD) criterion. However, the complete gate-level synthesis of the proposed matching criterion is much less than those of the MAD and the PDC in the VLSI implementation.