Nowadays, video cameras are often used for monitoring areas under surveillance. For monitoring more complex surroundings a plurality of video cameras are commonly employed, whereby the resulting data from the plurality of video cameras is viewed on-line or stored in data-bases and checked off-line. With a growing number of video cameras also the amount of the stored video data is increasing rapidly, which finally results in an enormous effort to search through the video data on- or off-line in case a time instance or location of a certain interesting event is unknown. Improvements are achieved by using systems for content-based indexing and retrieval of video data. A
video retrieval system 1 is proposed comprising a retrieval means for retrieving trajectory data from a
database as a response to a search query, whereby the search query is formulated on the basis of a search trajectory 7, which is representable and / or represented as a plurality of search segments 17, 18, 19, whereby the retrieval means comprises interpreting means for generating a plurality of minimum hounding areas 24, 25, 26, 27, whereby the plurality of the minimum hounding areas 24, 25, 26, 27 covers the search trajectory 7 or at least one of the search segments 17, 18, 19 and whereby the retrieval means is realised for accessing the
database 5 by using at least one of the minimum bounding areas 24, 25, 26, 27 as a query area, whereby the minimum bounding areas 24, 25, 26, 27 of the plurality of bounding areas are arranged overlap-free and / or adjacently or with a search trajectory independent overlap.