Abstract: Color-based image retrieval has been widely used due to good robustness to various changes of images. How- ever, lack of color spatial information leads to retrieval errors. According to retrieval problems caused by global color histogram and block histogram, the paper proposed a new image retrieval method that uses equal-area rectangle ring to extract image features. Firstly, we made use of equal-area rectangle ring partitioning strategy to block the image. Se condly,we extracted sub-block accumulative color histogram as color features. Thirdly, we set weight values according to gradual reducing of rectangle ring from inside to outside in order to highlight the main part of an image, and got the simi- larity measures of two images by calculating weighed accumulative distance which is between the sulrblocks color fca- lures of two images, then retrieved images and outputed the retrieval results. At last, experimental results show that the proposed method has a higher retrieval effect, comparing to global histogram, cumulative histogram and traditional block histogram.

Key words: Image retrieve, Cumulative histogram, Color feature, Equal-area of rectangular ring partition