Systems and methods for detecting robust fade and dissolve and video sequences. The systems and methods use a two step approach to detect both discontinuous cuts and gradual changes in a video sequence. Specifically, an input video signal is first divided into video segments based on the location of the discontinuous cut. A gradual change detector is then applied to the discontinuous cut segments to determine further cuts based on editing characteristics. By using this two part approach, the systems and methods of this invention can robustly detect scene breaks within a video.