The present invention relates to an image processing device and method, a program, and a recording medium whereby the detection precision of a motion vector by the gradient method can be further improved. A counter value computing unit 451 acquires the number of valid pixels, the number of pixels having no gradient in the horizontal direction, and the number of pixels having no gradient in the vertical direction from a valid pixel number counter 441, a no-horizontal-gradient counter 442, and a no-vertical-gradient counter 443, computes the ratio between valid pixels within a computation block and one-sided gradient pixels among the valid pixels, and controls the value of a flag which a flag setting unit 452 sets in accordance with the computation results. The flag setting unit 452 sets the value of a gradient flag, and outputs the gradient flag to the subsequent stage. At the subsequent stage, gradient method computation and vector evaluation processing are executed based on the gradient flag. The present invention can be applied to a signal processing device for performing frame frequency conversion processing from a 24P signal to a 60P signal.