Abstract. This paper presents a novel approach for video shot boundary detection. The proposed approach is based on split and merge concept. A fisher linear discriminant criterion is used to guide the process of both splitting and merging. For the purpose of capturing the between class and within class scatter we employ 2D 2 FLD method which works on texture feature of regions in each frame of a video. Further to reduce the complexity of the process we propose to employ spectral clustering to group related regions together to a single there by achieving reduction in dimension. The proposed method is experimentally also validated on a cricket video. It is revealed that shots obtained by the proposed approach are highly cohesive and loosely coupled.