The present invention relates to an encoding method processing video object planes (VOPs) of I, P or B type and including a dynamic allocation of said VOPs. According to said method, for each input frame a preliminary forward motion estimation is carried out between current and previous frames. Current and previous motion fields are then used to evaluate a coherence factor, expressed as connected to the sums of local differences within current and previous motion field. According to the value of the coherence factor with respect to an empirically determined threshold, a decision is finally taken on the type of the frame to be coded.