Abstract: In order to retrieve color images of a salient object，especially for those images with simple events and scenes，such as trademark images and landmark images，a new image retrieval method with combinational features is proposed.On the basis of the analysis of spectral energy distribution model，the color boundary is used to build a histogram of contour and color invariants to extract a descriptor of key points，thus to present a kind of feature retrieval method combining contour and local features，called CIFO. Experiments on sets of images were carried out by applying CIFO.Experimental results show that，with regard to the retrieving of color images with salient object，the CIFO method has obvious advantages over the other three classical feature-based retrieval methods.