Abstract: Aiming at overcoming the difficulties of effect and the problem of threshold ensuring in shot boundary detection, a new method of adaptive shot boundary detection is proposed. For the shot cuts detection, distance values between brightness-differences and their average are used as detected features, and the threshold automatically chosen by the variety of the values. For the gradual shot changes detection, color-differences are used as detected feature, by quantification of color-differences according to their magnitude, gradual shot changes can be detected directly. The experimental result showed that the precision and recall are 96.74% and 97.41% for shot cuts detection; 92.34% and 89.67% for gradual shot changes detection. Besides these, the method is stable with different video types.