Abstract: This paper presents a new content based image retrieval approach based on histogram of pattern orientations, namely pattern orientation histogram (POH) method. POH represents the spatial distribution of five different pattern orientations: vertical, horizontal, diagonal down/left, diagonal down/right and non-orientation. In this method, a given image is first divided into image-blocks and frequency of each type of patterns is determined in each image-block. Then local pattern histograms for each of these image-blocks are computed. As a result, local pattern histograms are obtained for each image. We compared our method with one of the texture descriptors MPEG-7 standard. Experimental results demonstrate that POH leads to better precision and recall rates than edge histogram descriptor (EHD) of MPEG-7 standard for search and retrieval of digital imagery.