Abstract. This chapter summarizes recent advances in video abstraction for fast content browsing, skimming, transmission, and retrieval of massive video database which are demanded in many system applications, such as web multimedia, mobile multimedia, interactive TV, and emerging 3D TV. Video summarization and skimming aims to provide an abstract of a long video for shortening the navigation and browsing the original video. The challenge of video summarization is to effectively extract certain content of the video while preserving essential messages of the original video. In this chapter, the preliminary on video temporal structure analysis is introduced, various video summarization schemes, such as using low-level features, motion descriptors and Eigen-features, are described, and case studies on two practical summarization schemes are presented with experimental results.