There are a growing number of applications, which extensively use the visual media. A key requirement in those applications is efficient access to the stored visual information for the purposes of indexing, fast retrieval, and scene analysis. To support this vision, many scene change detection algorithms have been developed for both sudden and gradual scene change in uncompressed domain. This paper presents a comparison of shot boundary detection and classification techniques and their variations including histogram, pixel‐differences, likelihood ratio, and motion vector. In addition, the pros and cons of each approach with many clarifying comments are presented.