In this paper, an efficient video content representation is proposed using optimal extraction of characteristic frames and scenes. This representation, apart from providing browsing capabilities to digital video databases, also allows more efficient content-based queries and indexing. For performing the frame/scene extraction, a feature vector formulation of the images is proposed based on color and motion segmentation. Then, the scene selection is accomplished by clustering similar scenes based on a distortion criterion. Frame selection is performed using an optimization method for locating a set of minimally correlated feature vectors.