1. A method of determining temporal correspondence between different sets of video data, the method comprising: inputting the sets of video data; representing the video data as ordered sequences of visual nucleotides; and determining temporally corresponding subsets of video data by aligning the sequences of visual nucleotides; wherein the visual nucleotides are computed by: representing a temporal interval of the video data as a collection of features and feature descriptors; discarding the spatial coordinates of the features, and grouping similar feature descriptors into bins according to a grouping function; and creating visual nucleotides that correspond to the coefficients of the various feature descriptor bins; and wherein the features are chosen so as to be substantially invariant with respect to video resolution, orientation, or lighting.