With the popularity of digital equipment in video producing, digital video effect (DVE) has been more and more frequently used in shot transitions, so that the demand of DVE transition detection is proposed for the video indexing and retrieval system. In this paper, the limitation of the exiting 2-D spatial-temporal image analysis methods is pointed out through the analysis of DVE transition model, and a transition-surface-based DVE detection method is proposed. Basic thoughts and the implementation of this are detailed,as well as the experimental result and analysis.