Extracting a small number of key frames that can abstract the content of vi
deo is very important for efficient browsing and retrieval in video databas
es. In this paper, the key frame extraction problem is considered from a se
t-theoretic point of view, and systematic algorithms are derived to find a
compact set of key frames that can represent a video segment for a given de
gree of fidelity. The proposed extraction algorithms can be hierarchically
applied to obtain a tree-structured key frame hierarchy that is a multileve
l abstract of the video. The key frame hierarchy enables an efficient conte
nt-based retrieval by using the depth-first search scheme with pruning. Int
ensive experiments on a variety of video sequences are presented to demonst
rate the improved performance of the proposed algorithms over the existing
approaches.