Method for detecting scene changes in a digital video stream

1. Field of the Invention A system and method that processes video to extract a keyframe-based adequate visual representation. The method utilizes a hierarchical processing technique. The first stage in the hierarchy extracts a chromatic difference metric from a pair of video frames. An initial set of frames is chosen based on the chromatic metric and a threshold. A structural difference measurement is extracted from this initial set of frames. A second threshold is used to select key frames from the initial set. The first and second thresholds are user selectable. The output of this process is the visual representation. The method is extensible to any number of metrics and any number of levels.