Key frame extraction has been recognized as one of tile important research issues in video information retrieval. Although progress has been made in key frame extraction, the existing approaches do not evaluate the importance of extracted frame Quantitatively, and Dey are computationally expensive or ineffective. In this Paper, we introduce a new 미해rithm for key frame extraction using shot coverage and distortion. The algorithm finds significant key frames from candidate key frames. When selecting the candidate frames, the coverage rate to the total frames from each frame is computed by using the difference between the adjacent frames in tile shot. The frames within 10$\%$ from the top are selected as the candidates. Then, by comfuting the distortion rate of the candidates against all frames, pick the frames which arc most representative are selected. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified by a statistical test. Experiments show that more than 13-50$\%$ improvement has been obtained by the proposed algorithm compared to the existing methods.