A motion detector, particularly for use in a television system for transmitting television pictures in a digital form, is adapted to partition each picture into pixel blocks, to subject each pixel block to a modified intraframe transform for determining a first coefficient which corresponds to the basic picture having the lowest horizontal and highest vertical frequency, and to determine a plurality of further coefficients which correspond to basic pictures also having the lowest horizontal frequency, but a vertical frequency which is lower than that for the first coefficient. The motion detector signalizes the presence of motion within a pixel block if the first coefficient has a large absolute value, but if simultaneously none of the furt...