Aiming at the problem of video key frame extraction, a density peak clustering algorithm is proposed, which uses the HSV histogram to transform high-dimensional abstract video image data into quantifiable low-dimensional data, and reduces the computational complexity while capturing image features. On this basis, the density peak clustering algorithm is used to cluster these low-dimensional data and find the cluster centers. Combining the clustering results, the final key frames are obtained. A large number of key frame extraction experiments for different types of videos show that the algorithm can extract different number of key frames by combining video content, overcome the shortcoming of traditional key frame extraction algorithm which can only extract a fixed number of key frames, and the extracted key frames can represent the main content of video accurately.