This paper presents a simple and efficient approach to action scene detection in martial arts movies.Quick tempo is an important movie-level character for action scene.A shot pace function defined by shot length and MPEG-7 motion activity is used to measure the tempo.From the shot pace change curve

it is easy to locate the rough position of action scene.According to the character of action scene development

action scene boundary is detected at the shot level by analyzing the visual contents of shots within and around the above rough region.Two clues from the movie-level and shot-level make the method simple;working on compressed video directly makes the method very fast.Experimental results based on real-world movies verify its efficiency.