Abstract: An image edge is the boundary between an object and the background, and indicates the boundary between overlapping objects. The image edges are the important clue to understand image content for they can mark the locations of discontinuities in depth, surface orientation, or reflectance. An edgcbased color image retrieval by using multiple fcatures was proposed. Firstly,the color edge was extracted by using canny detection operator. Secondly, color histogram and direction histogram about the extracted color edge image were computed as image features. Finally, the similarity between color images was computed by using a combined feature index based on two kinds of histograms. Experimental results show that the proposed image retrieval is more accurate and efficient in retrieving the user-interested images.

Key words: Image retrieval, Image edge, Color histogram, Direction histogram