Abstract: Shot boundary detection is one of the critical techniques in video browsing and indexing systems. In this paper, we propose a main color based shot boundary detection algorithm on DC images. We use the bit-rate information to decrease the number of I frames that take part in the shot change detection. Then we obtain local adaptive thresholds based on the main color of a segment ofthe video sequence. Finally, we detect shot change based on twin-comparison method. Experimental results show that our algorithm can detect shot boundary from a long video sequence with reduced computation, and at the same time solve the problems that are caused by object moving and camera panning in shot change detection.