An effective video indexing is required to manipulate large video databases. Most algorithms for video indexing have been commonly used histograms, edges, or motion features. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm using the luminance projection for video retrieval. To effectively index the video sequences and to reduce the computational complexity, we use the key frames extracted by the cumulative measure, and compare the set of key frames using the modified Hausdorff distance. Experimental results show that the proposed video indexing and video retrieval algorithm yields the higher accuracy and performance than the conventional algorithm.