In many current multimedia database systems

query or retrieval is only based on descriptive keywords of media

it ignores another important information resource(the content of media. Content based image retrieval techniques usually use the color histogram of the full image. But this method can't contain the spatial features. In this paper

we introduce a color-pair retrieval method that derived from color histogram. It can reflect the spatial information of the images. Therefore it can retrieval images with clear boundary. The ret rieval results are not affected by image's size

rotation and also the little changes of light. The experiment result shows this method improves the retrieval effect.