Video clip retrieval plays a critical role in the content-based video retrieval.However

existing clip retrieval methods mostly focused on retrieving similar video clips from pre-segmented clips.To automatically segment and retrieve similar video clips from a continuous video database

this paper presents an efficient method for video clip retrieval in which equivalence relation theory is applied to video clip retrieval for the first time.Matching function is defined in terms of equivalence relations corresponding with shots of given video clip.Several similar video clips are automatically segmented from video database using sliding shot window according to matching degree between two video clips.Afterwards

equivalence classes are mapped into matrix representation.Therefore various factors are computed to rank the similarity of the selected video clips by characters of the matrix.Experimental results showed that the method could segment similar video clips from continuous video database quickly

exactly and automatically.