A novel histogram descriptor for global feature extraction and description was presented. Three elementary primitives for a 2×2 pixel grid were defined. The complex primitives were computed by matrix transforms. These primitives and equivalence class were used for an image to compute the feature image that consisted of three elementary primitives. Histogram was used for the transformed image to extract and describe the features. Furthermore, comparisons were made among the novel histogram descriptor, the gray histogram and the edge histogram with regard to feature vector dimension and retrieval performance. The experimental results show that the novel histogram can not only reduce the effect of noise and illumination change, but also compute the feature vector of lower dimension. Furthermore, the system using the novel histogram has better retrieval performance.