The increasing development of advanced multimedia applications requires new technologies for organizing and retrieving by content databases of still digital images or digital video sequences. To this aim image and image sequence contents must be described and adequately coded. In this paper we describe a system allowing content-based annotation and querying in video databases. No user action is required during the database population step. The system automatically splits a video into a sequence

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... of shots, extracts a few representative frames (said r-frames) from each shot and computes r-frame descriptors based on color, texture and motion. Queries based on one or more features are possible. Very interesting results obtained during the severe tests the system was subjected to are reported and discussed.