A new image retrieval method based on optimal derivative filter is presented.Firstly,the interest point detector based on optimal derivative filter is used to determine the location of stable interest points in the scale-normalized image.Then,the convex hull and annular color histogram in the local field of the stable interest points are calculated to depict the features.Experiment results show that the method is simple to realize,robust to rotation and translation.Compared with other interest-points-based retrieval methods,it can improve the average retrieval precision by 7.0%-10.9%,and efficiently overcome the influence of unstable interest points.