A framework has been proposed for representing the trajectory of a moving object, using a novel hyperstring based approach for efficient retrieval of video shots. The hyperstring based model unifies both the structural and kinematic features for an improved representation of the trajectory. A Constraint-driven Adjacency Graph matching (CAGM) algorithm has been proposed to measure the similarity between a pair of query and model hyperstrings. Experiments have been performed on benchmark datasets of trajectories (one synthetic and three real-world video shots), to assess the performance (using Precision-Recall metric) of the proposed model. Results have been compared with two similar published works on video retrieval using trajectories, to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework. © 2012 IEEE.