An automatic procedure to detect and quantify patient motion during the acquisition of the tomographic views in single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) is proposed. This method first computes the optical flow vector field which assigns to each pixel of a tomographic view the two-dimensional displacement vector that describes its motion between two successive views. The average optical flow in a region of interest is then computed to measure its inter-view global motion. This algorithm is tested on a point source, on a cardiac phantom (with and without induced motion), and on a patient. The proposed method can accurately detect the presence of motion, localize the camera angle at which motion occurred, and measure the distance of motion. The optical flow method can be used to control the quality of the tomographic acquisition and to alert the user to the potential of reconstruction artifacts due to patient motion. It can also be used to correct for the translational motion in the direction of the axis of rotation of the camera.