Shot transition detection  Shot transition detection (or simply shot detection) also called cut detection is a field of research of video processing. Its subject is the automated detection of transitions between "shots" in digital video with the purpose of temporal segmentation of videos. Shot transition detection is used to split up a film into basic temporal units called "shots"; a "shot" is a series of interrelated consecutive pictures taken contiguously by a single camera and representing a continuous action in time and space. This operation is of great use in software for post-production of videos. It is also a fundamental step of automated indexing and content-based video retrieval or summarization applications which provide an efficient access to huge video archives, e.g. an application may choose a representative picture from each scene to create a visual overview of the whole film and, by processing such indexes, a search engine can process search items like "show me all films where there's a scene with a lion in it." Generally speaking, cut detection can do nothing that a human editor couldn't do manually, but it saves a lot of time. Furthermore, due to the increase in the use of digital video and, consequently, in the importance of the aforementioned indexing applications, the automatic cut detection is very important nowadays. In simple terms cut detection is about finding the positions in a video in that one scene is replaced by another one with different visual content. Technically speaking the following terms are used:  A digital video consists of frames that are presented to the viewer's eye in rapid succession to create the impression of movement. "Digital" in this context means both that a single frame consists of pixels and the data is present as binary data, such that it can be processed with a computer. Each frame within a digital video can be uniquely identified by its frame index, a serial number. A shot is a sequence of frames shot uninterruptedly by one camera. There are several film transitions usually used in film editing to juxtapose adjacent shots; In the context of shot transition detection they are usually group into two types: "Detecting a cut" means that the position of a cut is gained; more precisely a hard cut is gained as "hard cut between frame i and frame i+1", a soft cut as "soft cut from frame i to frame j". A transition that is detected correctly is called a hit, a cut that is there but was not detected is called a missed hit and a position in that the software assumes a cut, but where actually no cut is present, is called a false hit.