The estimation of camera motion is one of the most important aspects for video processing, analysis, indexing, and retrieval. Most of existing techniques to estimate camera motion are based on optical flow methods in the uncompressed domain. However, to decode and to analyze a video sequence is extremely time-consuming. Since video data are usually available in MPEG-compressed form, it is desirable to directly process video material without decoding. In this paper, we present a novel approach for estimating camera motion in MPEG video sequences. Our technique relies on linear combinations of optical flow models. The proposed method first creates prototypes of optical flow, and then performs a linear decomposition on the MPEG motion vectors, which is used to estimate the camera parameters. Experiments on synthesized and real-world video clips show that our technique is more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches for estimating camera motion in MPEG video sequences.